Audio By Carbonatix
It’s the day after the South African parliament repealed the Population Registration Act, one of the last chains in the lockup of apartheid. Halfway around the planet, South African reggae singer Lucky Dube is just waking up in the Hilton hotel in Halifax, Nova Scotia. When he answers the telephone, CNN is blaring in the background. Lucky knows what’s happened, but he’s taking the news with a large grain of salt. “Yaaah maaaan, it looks like things are changing,” he says, starting his sentence with one of the more endearing Rastafarianisms. “But you know, the problem’s not really with the government. If apartheid is still in people’s minds, it’s still happening.”
Dube has the distinction of being South Africa’s best-known homegrown reggae musician. Although most Americans think of dreadlocks and ganja when they hear the word, reggae is a music about rhythm and protest–and where better for such a form to flourish than in South Africa? But Dube is modest about the effect that his music, some of which was once banned by the government, had on the struggle.
“When I was banned, people wanted to listen. Rastas Never Die went underground because it was banned,” he says, referring to his first reggae album. “People knew it had a message. And I think that message helped. I think it made people aware.”
Dube decided to play reggae because he found Mbaqanga, the native African music he’d grown up with, too artistically confining. A traditional form of Zulu music, Mbaqanga, like most other forms of Afro-pop, is built on swirling rhythms and funky picked guitars. Although he still enjoys that music, Dube wanted to be different. “Everyone who grew up where I did knew that music, and pretty soon all the bands started copying each other,” he says. “Pretty soon, they all started sounding the same.”
Born into poverty in Ermelo, South Africa, Dube never even heard reggae until he was an adult. Beginning his musical career as a Mbaqanga singer, Dube stayed with a band long enough to record six albums.
“I just didn’t see any future in it, you know,” he says. “That’s when I started listening to Bob and Peter and Jimmy.”
Dube says those names–that’s Bob Marley, Peter Tosh, and Jimmy Cliff–like they are old friends, even though he’s never met them. But they are his spiritual and musical mentors, and were the source of his inspiration when he turned to reggae in 1984. Like the big Jamaican acts, Dube travels with a six-piece band and an entourage of female dancers who perform the bouncy, energetic reggae choreography. Ironically, not long after Dube began playing reggae, Paul Simon’s Graceland album made Mbaqanga and other forms of African music popular. Players of Mbaqanga, Juju, Soukous and most other forms of native music began touring the world. The world’s largest record labels rushed in, and from Tunis to Johannesburg, signed anything and everything African.
Meanwhile, Dube struggled on his foreign tours to fill clubs and to get a small, independent American label to release a pair of his records. If he’d kept playing African music, he might be a big star today. Struck by this unexpected turn of fate, Dube says he has no regrets.
“I got to play what I do,” he says. “The reggae is in me, man, you know.” He’s made four albums in that genre. Only two, Slave and Prisoner (both for the Shanachie label), are currently available in the United States. A new studio album and a new live record are both done, but Dube says he’s unsure whether either will be released outside South Africa. A successful American-Canadian tour might pave the way for their release here.
The switch from Mbaqanga to reggae wasn’t that hard for Dube. Both musical forms share strong rhythms. Like the blues, jazz and rock ‘n’ roll, reggae inherited them from Africa. It’s those familiar rhythms, submerged in a foreign and therefore “new and different” music, that make reggae so popular in South Africa today. The popularity of reggae in South Africa brings up another irony in Dube’s story. While African music has become a hit in Europe and in this country–markets where reggae had its first big break twenty years ago–Africans are listening more to reggae and less to their own native music. It’s the old grass-is-always-greener complex gone rhythmic. Despite the informal performance boycott that many musicians have observed to protest apartheid, reggae giants like Jimmy Cliff have toured South Africa in recent years, choosing to bring their music and message to what is currently the world’s most enthusiastic reggae audience.
In South Africa, a country of 36 million, Dube’s Slave album sold more than 500,000 copies. And that takes into
