Burying Lucky Dube1

Abstract

This article focuses on the murder of the reggae icon Lucky Dube in late 2007 and on the events that followed until his burial a few days later. The article tries to assess why his music carried such power on the African continent and globally – as the instant digital responses to his death made clear. Did he sing to the subalterns of the world across and beyond national boundaries in a tradition that set the anger of reggae within the ‘phatic and ineffable’ power of the sonic, as Paul Gilroy writes of music in The Black Atlantic? The article also explores the tensions of the conjunction of sacred and secular as Lucky Dube's global, African and South African fans mingled with members of the Nazareth Baptist Church at his memorial and later at his funeral. It discusses the unease of the post-apartheid, postcolonial nation briefly made public by the manner of his death, the conflicts of national subjectivity that surfaced as the events of murdered icon and world success at rugby flashed up together in the national consciousness. In describing the memorial for Dube at the Bassline in Newtown, Johannesburg, the article asks if we should see this as a ritual of rebellion or a moment of liminality in the postcolonial state, searching for healing in a moment of crisis.