Corbis

LIKE the birds or the beasts, musicians can sometimes be seers of tumultuous change. Lucky Dube, the best-loved and biggest-selling reggae star in South Africa, looked much like a prophet, with thick dreadlocks falling to his chest and a craggy, bearded face. His singing, too, as he leapt around the stage, was high, light and oracular, simple words set to drums, bass and two keyboards, which nevertheless detected fault-lines the authorities often could not see.

This made him dangerous—though the danger was hidden in the lilting rhythms and Mr Dube's dazzling smile. In the 1990s he performed once, because of a booking mix-up, in a military camp run by the South African Defence Force, and enjoyed watching the white soldiers dance while he sang, catchily and sunnily, “I am a prisoner in my own country”, and hummed Zulu insults at them.

He was already a thorn under the hide of the apartheid regime, singing things that were forbidden. He had started as a mbaqanga singer, making traditional Zulu “tourist music”, as he called it, and selling plenty of records. But from his teenage years he was in thrall to the music of Bob Marley and the chief guitarist of the Wailers, Peter Tosh, envying the drive and edge of Jamaican reggae. At his own concerts he would dive off into that music, with its undertow of social and political subversion couched in blatant English, and find that the crowd loved it.

In 1984 he dared to make a mini-album, “Rastas Never Die”. Though he had drifted into Rastafarianism out of schoolboy curiosity, believing only parts of it and smoking no ganja, the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) saw the album as a challenge, and banned it from the airwaves. It sold a mere 4,000 copies. But he made another (“Think about the Children”, 1985), then another (“Slave”, 1987), all the time notching up more sales and ratcheting up the menace in the music.

“Slave” was ostensibly about alcoholism, which had broken up his own family before he was born. But it included the phrase “I'm just a slave, a legal slave”, which was not to do with drinking. To make the message clearer, Mr Dube renamed his backing band “The Slaves”. The record, though unplayed by the SABC, went to triple gold in three months.

The next year Mr Dube got bolder still. At a recording session he sang gently, on to the tape,

Too many people





Hate apartheid





Why do you like it?

His recording engineer stopped the tape, telling him he couldn't say that. But Mr Dube not only said it; he also persuaded the SABC to air it, the first anti-apartheid song to be played on a white station. The album, “Together as One”, sold 100,000 copies in its first five days, becoming the soundtrack of the anti-apartheid movement. In that week, too—as if Mr Dube had sensed the first ripples of the coming wave of change—eight of South Africa's long-term political prisoners were suddenly released from jail.

Down Highway 54

None of this seemed to be in Mr Dube's future when he was born, the sickly first son of a single mother on a run-down farm in East Transvaal. He began to work, as a child, trimming gardens in white suburbs. His first drums were “borrowed” from a school cupboard, his first guitar bought with the proceeds of a little play he had written. He might have sung Zulu township jive all his life, if he had not felt compelled to give “a message” to the world for which reggae was his ideal language.

The message was peace, unity, love and respect. It was much bound up with the clean-living Rastafarianism he had plucked out of the encyclopedia, but it was also drawn from his own South African experience. His songs, he said, were about life, not politics. Nor was his music just a borrowing from Jamaica: it was rooted in Africa, especially in the ancient drums that were used to communicate hope, fear or joy between one village and another.

With the end of apartheid in 1994 Mr Dube became a world star, signed by Motown. But there was still plenty to sing against at home. 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, apparently unstoppable by bodyguards, police or high walls.

Do you ever worry





About your house being broke into





Do you ever worry





About your car being taken away from you





In broad daylight





Down Highway 54

It was not down Highway 54, but in Rosettenville, a suburb of Johannesburg; and it was not in broad daylight, but at 8.20 at night, that Lucky Dube's vehicle was carjacked by five men. He was shot to death in front of two of his seven children. But for his legions of fans throughout Africa and beyond it, mourning the senseless loss of a musician they also considered a liberator, his prophecy had come close enough.