Lucky Dube

Well supported

Lucky Philip Dube (3 August 1964 - 18 October 2007) was Africa's best-selling reggae artist, and got there by giving up a career that was already working. Born in Ermelo, he recorded six albums of Zulu mbaqanga from 1981 before turning to reggae in the mid-1980s, having heard Peter Tosh, Bob Marley and Jimmy Cliff. The apartheid state banned the result, Rastas Never Die, in 1985 — which settled the question of whether the change was commercial. Slave followed and went gold, and Prisoner and House of Exile carried a protest music that was pointedly not bitter, addressed at a system rather than at people. He toured widely and was among the first African artists to make reggae something other than an import. He was shot dead in the Johannesburg suburb of Rosettenville on 18 October 2007, in front of two of his children, in what police treated as a carjacking.