Lucky Dube

Lucky Philip Dube was born on the third of August 1964 at Ermelo in the Eastern Transvaal of South Africa, the youngest of three children of his Zulu mother who had separated from his Xhosa father before his birth and raised him alongside his older brother and sister in straitened circumstances at her family kraal at Ermelo. He attended the Ermelo segregated primary school under apartheid Bantu Education through his sixth standard. He took the name Lucky from his mother's insistence that he was the only one of her children born without complications.

He sang from his eighth year in the Ermelo Methodist Church choir under the choirmaster Andrew Sithole and from his thirteenth year in the school choir at his secondary school. He formed at sixteen the mbaqanga township-jive group The Skyway Band with two Ermelo classmates and toured the Eastern Transvaal mbaqanga circuit through his late teens. He moved to Pretoria at eighteen to join the Love Brothers — another mbaqanga band — and recorded five mbaqanga albums with them at the Gallo Mavuthela division.

He converted from mbaqanga to reggae in 1984 at twenty after attending a Peter Tosh concert during the latter's South African tour. His debut reggae album Rastas Never Die of 1985 sold only modestly. His third reggae album Slave of 1987 — recorded in defiance of the apartheid government's continuing political censorship of the genre — sold over five hundred thousand copies in South Africa alone and broke the eight-million-copies international threshold within five years.

He recorded across the following twenty years twenty-two studio albums and toured continuously across North America, Europe, the Caribbean and East Africa. The 1989 album Together as One and the 1993 album Victims established him as the principal African reggae voice of the 1990s. He was twice voted the best-selling African artist by the World Music Awards in 1993 and 1996.

He was shot dead by carjackers in front of his two teenage children in the Rosettenville district of Johannesburg on the eighteenth of October 2007 while dropping the children off at their uncle's home. He was forty-three.

He is honored here as the principal African reggae voice of his generation.