Lucky Dube

For me the music of South African reggae sensation Lucky Dube will always be bathed in the nostalgia of hearing those songs over and over again in dirty, sweaty night clubs in Madagascar. He was pretty famous as far as African musicians go, but it was still a bit of a surprise to see that The Economist ran an obituary for him after he was murdered last week in a car theft. It had never really occurred to me until reading the obit how many of those songs were written when the apartheid regime was still running South Africa. They're much more provocative when you think of them that way. For some reason it always seem easy to forget that apartheid wasn't really that long ago. Neither, for that matter, was colonialism.

Incidentally, I've recently read two really good book on African history: John Reader's Africa: A Biography of the Continent and Martin Meredith's The Fate of Africa. Both were excellent, although I'd say Reader was especially outstanding.