Howard Campbell, Gleaner Writer
AS HIS countrymen celebrated the 10th anniversary of the end of Apartheid on Wednesday, South African reggae singer Lucky Dube, was getting ready to perform in the tiny Caribbean island of Anguilla. Though he was thousands of miles away, Dube's mind was close to home.
"That was a very important day for me. Music did a lot to end Apartheid, even though the government of the day banned our songs because of their message but that could not stop us," said Dube on Friday from New Orleans where he is promoting his latest album, The Other Side.
During the mid and late 1980s, Lucky Dube (real name Ermelo Dube) was one of the musical voices that spoke against the system that separated South Africa's different ethnic groups. Initially, he recorded in his tribal Mbaqanga but switched to reggae after becoming drawn to the militance of the Jamaican sound.
"The Government banned reggae music from the radio and prevented it from being sold in stores because it made people aware but people managed to smuggle in albums and pirate copies into the country from (neighbouring) Zimbabwe and Swaziland," Dube said.
Born in the Eastern Transvaal region of South Africa, Dube says he discovered the music of Jimmy Cliff and Bob Marley as a pre-teen, but revealed that it was Peter Tosh who made the biggest impact on his music.
"His Moma Africa album really got me interested," said Dube. "He was talking about missing Africa and he was in Jamaica. He was talking to me in Africa."
Tosh's music was popular throughout Africa, particularly in the 1980s, while Marley's songs were played by Robert Mugabe's rebel troops in Rhodesia during their fight for freedom against Ian Smith's outlaw government. When that country became independent Zimbabwe in 1980, Marley performed there at the invitation of the new government.
Neither Tosh nor Marley, former colleagues in The Wailers vocal group, ever performed in South Africa due to the United Nations' embargo against that country. But Cliff did a mini-tour there in the mid-1980s when many of the world's leading musicians called out for sanctions against president P.W. Botha's racist regime.
Dube, whose vocal style has been compared to Tosh's, was one of several performers that emerged from the African continent during the late 1980s. Along with Senegal's Youssou N'Dour, his music reached a new audience in Europe and the United States after he was signed to an American record company.
Jamaica, and the Caribbean, had both a positive and negative on the world's relationship with South Africa during the Apartheid era. In the 1950s, Jamaican premier Norman Manley championed sanctions against the country; in 1983 and 1984, former Jamaica and West Indies batsman, Lawrence Rowe, led two rebel cricket tours by West Indians to South Africa.
