Un-Lucky Dube

I guess we are all ever caught up in ironies in our lives even if it emanates from our names. As Earl Spencer said during Princess Diana’s funeral, the irony was that a girl named after the Goddess of hunting became the most hunted person of our times. Lucky, the boy named after surviving a terrible illness - and proving that he was indeed the lucky one - ended up as another unLucky statistic of violent crime in Johannesburg.

It’s truly a sad incident, and even I, the guy who makes fun of every situation was lost for words when I heard the news. ‘That’s life,’ a distraught colleague at Workland comforted me. ‘More like death’, I replied.

For sometime ago, believe it or not, I used to wear dreads and for that period of one whole year, I became quite the reggae fanatic to the point that even my language bordered on the fake-Jamaikenya unknown to most of my folks.

And I would teasingly parody Lucky Dube’s lyrics like those in the song ‘Together As One’ by stating that ‘Catherine and Joseph Are Giving Each Other, Why Not Us’ rather than the standard ‘The Cats And The Dogs Have Forgiven Each Other, Why Not Us?’

Yet, such lyrics more than anything else, made Dube a very appealing person and made him the first foreign artiste whose concert I ever attended. He enthralled and will still do so even in his death, since we shall still play his music and learn from it.

'Hey you Kenyan, hey you Ugandan, Namibian man, you've got to come together as one...' And as that song used to say: Not Forgetting The Japanese.

It is only fair that I end this post with a Japanese word to Lucky Dube: Sayonara!