I was recently on a street in Moshi, Tanzania when a street vendor told me that Lucky Dube had been murdered. I was amazed that Mr Dube had made such an impact all the way up in Tanzania. (I later found that Reggae is extremely popular in Tanzania)

The Economist has this obituary on Lucky Dube who was murdered during a hijacking recently. From the article:

• Lucky Dube was “the best-loved and biggest-selling reggae star in South Africa.”
• He “drifted into Rastafarianism out of schoolboy curiosity, believing only parts of it and smoking no ganja.”
• Dube eventually persuaded the SABC to air “the first anti-apartheid song to be played on a white station.”
• He took on drugs (“You go sniffling them glue/No good for you”); promiscuity and AIDS (“Don’t you think it’s time/to be a little more responsible”) and racial quotas (“We are tired of people who/think that affirmative action is the way out/and is another way of putting puppets/where they don’t belong.”)
• “He also sang against South Africa’s appalling crime wave” which eventually claimed his life