Oct 11th 2007
From The Economist print edition
Jim Michaels, transformer of business journalism, died on October 2nd, aged 86
HE WAS used to ordure, because at school (Culver Military Academy, Indiana), they had made him shovel it, “wet manure, which is not like dried manure. It's very heavy.” He knew about sludge, because as an ambulance-driver in Burma in the war he had spent long hours in it. So when Jim Michaels came to Forbes in 1954, charged with shaking things up, it was second nature to take the hacks' copy and wring it through his typewriter, digging out the buried leads and the smothered conclusions, cutting the waffle, and transforming “oatmeal” into lean, tight prose. He did this for 38 years of editing the magazine, from 1961 to 1999. Circulation rose sixfold while he was there.
Tiny though he was, he was terrifying. Business journalism, for him, was a tough trade. When writers joined they were given a tape recorder for phone calls, to give them crucial backing when they were hauled into court. They were hustled to get better stories than the competition, different ones, and sooner; covers were scrapped and copies pulped if a piece had appeared elsewhere. “No guts, no story”, ran a Forbes ad in his time. His journalists had to be brave, and one way to show their pluck was to survive working with Jim.
“Curmudgeon” was too soft a word for him. When editing, he was a man of shrill explosions and unmasked savagery. “EITHER FIX THIS OR DUMP IT,” ran his capitals, rampaging through the piece. “THAT ALL VERY TOUCHING BUT WHAT DOES IT MEAN”. “CAN WQE SPEAK ENGLISH HOWARD AND STOP THIS STTINKING JARHGON!!!!!!!!.” Shorter was always better; he could cut 15%, he said, from any piece, and was rumoured to be able to get the Lord's Prayer down to six choice words. A reporter once wrote a euphoric story about Nepal, ending with the plaintive line: “I don't know why they would ever want to leave such a beautiful spot.” “Ya dont. did you ever go hungry or jobless????” came the furiously typed reply.
The journalists who came, trembling, through his boot camp—many of them moving on to high perches at the Wall Street Journal, Fortune, the New York Times and even The Economist—clipped his comments and kept them. Some took his edits home, unpicking them at leisure, as they licked their wounds, to try to see exactly how their copy had been so improved. His edits, seen by everyone on the open filing system, were surreptitiously collected in the “Abuse File”. Some entries became famous outside the magazine, such as his wild reaction to “upscale”: “IF I SEE THIS WORD AGAIN ILL UPTHROW”. Copies are still circulating.
Mr Michaels was not a tyrant by nature. He had a streak of tenderness in him. A book of favourite poems was often in his pocket, and he once told a journalist, reporting for work the day after his first child was born, to “Go home and be a father.” (The same journalist, caught leaving the building with a dozen copies of the magazine, was told, with a smile, that he had excellent taste in reading.) He skewered stories, and people, because he wanted the copy in Forbes to be provocative, sceptical and dramatic. Each story was pushed to the edge, and the fact-checkers, legions of them, were made to justify the claims or get them taken out. If they let an error through (whisper had it), they were fired.
“Bah! Overvalued!”
Mr Michaels loved, and revelled in, American capitalism. (“Forbes: Capitalist tool” was an ideal slogan for him, hitting the lefties with their own language.) But he did not like corporate managers as a breed. Business iconoclasts he admired, but he hated sycophancy (“Why not just send them a nice lacy valentine and forget the prose?”), and once considered a cover story on phonies who had made it to the top. He refused to pay court to businessmen by going to their dinners or holidaying in the Hamptons. Forbes's founder, Malcolm Forbes, could do that. Mr Michaels—sharp-eyed, endlessly curious, unbuyable—would hold them to account.
Arriving at Forbes, he found a second-rate investment magazine running flattery about corporations. Mr Michaels proposed to help small investors in a different way, by telling them, in unvarnished prose, which stock picks were good and which were not. (He did the same, in retirement, on “Forbes on Fox”, where his “Bah! Overvalued!” kept TV audiences alert.) It was he who first thought of rating mutual funds. He was less keen on Forbes's annual Rich List of the 400 wealthiest Americans, partly because it was first tried out in his rival Fortune, but mostly because he thought it was a stupid thing for Forbes to do. He changed his mind as it improved.
Where he never wavered was over the importance of straight, short and timely reporting. He had learned that lesson young. On his first posting as a newsman, with United Press in India in 1948, he had managed a world scoop by witnessing the death of Mahatma Gandhi. It was a story that caused him agony to write. Gandhi was someone he revered. With not a word spare, and without sentimentality, he described the emaciated figure crumpling under the assassin's bullets, the last gesture of forgiveness and, the next day, the burning of the body on the banks of the Jumna. After that, perhaps, the pretensions of corporate America could never have had much hold on him.
zaterdag 27 oktober 2007
Haidar Abdel Shafi
Oct 4th 2007
From The Economist print edition
Haidar Abdel Shafi, a model for the Palestinians, died on September 25th, aged 88
IN THE spring of 1948, around March as he remembered it, Haidar Abdel Shafi found himself at nightfall, waiting, in a small mud hut by the side of the main road in Deir al-Balah. Around him stretched groves of olive and orange trees. Palestine, in those days, was a community of peasants and landowners; a man was judged by how many trees he had. Haidar's father had had none, preferring—as he told the astonished neighbours—to save money for schooling his six children rather than buy plantations. The lanky boy, with his dark brows, had shaken the dust from his feet and gone away to study. But he was back now, defending the land.
Beside him lay a bag of first-aid equipment. He was a doctor, trained in Beirut and Jerusalem, now based in Gaza, and one of only about a dozen practising in the whole southern sector of Palestine. With his few colleagues he had founded, in 1945, a southern branch of the Palestine Medical Society, and together they had attended the first Palestine Medical Congress. Since his student days, when he had first been inspired by Arab pan-nationalism, he had looked on doctoring as a form of resistance: to illness, to poverty and, by strengthening the common people, to political troubles and oppressions. When it came to organising Palestinians, a community not easily made coherent, a network of doctors, clinics and waiting rooms might serve as well as any political party. But crouching in a hut by the main road was not his normal mode of operation.
Somewhere ahead of him were a group of fedayeen, Arab guerrilla fighters, who had come to attack the Jewish settlement of Kfar Darom. The settlement, one of many built on purchased land in Palestine in the years before the establishment of Israel, was well-defended, surrounded by circle after circle of barbed wire. Within the circles the ground was mined, and the whole scene was overlooked by Jewish observation towers.
The battle, though it raged all night, was a bloody defeat for the fedayeen: 12 killed, with Dr Abdel Shafi's first-aid bag no match for the mines and the snipers. The Zionists seemed superbly organised. Indeed, it was usually so. All through his long career, in which he was a founder-member of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) and represented Gaza on the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC), the doctor's chief lament about his own people was their disarray. They had little notion of democracy, being loyal instead to Yasser Arafat, a strongman who monopolised all decision-making and surrounded himself with thieves. And they turned out in the end to have no capacity for national unity, splintering into factions—Hamas, Fatah, Islamic Jihad and the rest—who then fought one another. The Israelis, as he often pointed out, needed only to watch the Palestinians destroy themselves, as they had watched that March night from their high, dark towers.
Requiem for the olive trees
Dr Abdel Shafi was that rarest of figures, a secular and non-sectarian Palestinian leader whose integrity and outspokenness made him a model for all the rest. He was of the left, in an old socialist way, but was never a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine; a doctor's role, he seemed to believe, was to stay detached from such affiliations. Far more useful was his decision to found and direct the Gaza branch of the Red Crescent, his own rallying organisation for Palestinian improvement. The Islamists attacked him, and in 1981 burned his clinic down; he noted then, stoically, that the Israelis who then ruled Gaza did not trouble to intervene.
On both the PLO and the PLC he was a gadfly, denouncing corruption and resigning with much publicity from the PLC, in 1997, because it was doing nothing to counter Israeli ambitions. The Palestinian Authority infuriated him because it would not control the intifada and was allowing Palestinians (though, he stressed, they had every reason to rebel) to commit random violence against Jewish civilians. He never ran for president in the 1996 elections, but might have done well if he had.
Though the Israelis twice deported him and then confined him to Gaza for his long-term refusal to co-operate, he did not oppose the existence of Israel. The Jewish presence was a reality, and the Jewish state had to be accepted. Nor did he dislike Jews: at Sabbath dusks, as a boy, he had been in demand to light the lamps of his Jewish neighbours. But there had to be a spirit of “mutuality and reciprocity”: two viable states, side by side, within the 1967 borders, and no Jewish settlers on Palestinian land. Until the settlements stopped entirely, he insisted, there was no point in any peace plan for the Middle East.
This was his message at the Madrid Conference in 1991 and at the Washington talks that followed—talks which he led and which were undermined, to his disgust, by secret accords made later at Oslo between Arafat and the Israelis. His speech at Madrid was perhaps the most eloquent the West had ever heard from a Palestinian: a plea for understanding, for sympathy and for territory. “What requiem can be sung”, he asked, “for trees uprooted by army bulldozers? And...who can explain to those whose lands are confiscated and clear waters stolen, a message of peace? Remove the barbed wire. Restore the land.”
From The Economist print edition
Haidar Abdel Shafi, a model for the Palestinians, died on September 25th, aged 88
IN THE spring of 1948, around March as he remembered it, Haidar Abdel Shafi found himself at nightfall, waiting, in a small mud hut by the side of the main road in Deir al-Balah. Around him stretched groves of olive and orange trees. Palestine, in those days, was a community of peasants and landowners; a man was judged by how many trees he had. Haidar's father had had none, preferring—as he told the astonished neighbours—to save money for schooling his six children rather than buy plantations. The lanky boy, with his dark brows, had shaken the dust from his feet and gone away to study. But he was back now, defending the land.
Beside him lay a bag of first-aid equipment. He was a doctor, trained in Beirut and Jerusalem, now based in Gaza, and one of only about a dozen practising in the whole southern sector of Palestine. With his few colleagues he had founded, in 1945, a southern branch of the Palestine Medical Society, and together they had attended the first Palestine Medical Congress. Since his student days, when he had first been inspired by Arab pan-nationalism, he had looked on doctoring as a form of resistance: to illness, to poverty and, by strengthening the common people, to political troubles and oppressions. When it came to organising Palestinians, a community not easily made coherent, a network of doctors, clinics and waiting rooms might serve as well as any political party. But crouching in a hut by the main road was not his normal mode of operation.
Somewhere ahead of him were a group of fedayeen, Arab guerrilla fighters, who had come to attack the Jewish settlement of Kfar Darom. The settlement, one of many built on purchased land in Palestine in the years before the establishment of Israel, was well-defended, surrounded by circle after circle of barbed wire. Within the circles the ground was mined, and the whole scene was overlooked by Jewish observation towers.
The battle, though it raged all night, was a bloody defeat for the fedayeen: 12 killed, with Dr Abdel Shafi's first-aid bag no match for the mines and the snipers. The Zionists seemed superbly organised. Indeed, it was usually so. All through his long career, in which he was a founder-member of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) and represented Gaza on the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC), the doctor's chief lament about his own people was their disarray. They had little notion of democracy, being loyal instead to Yasser Arafat, a strongman who monopolised all decision-making and surrounded himself with thieves. And they turned out in the end to have no capacity for national unity, splintering into factions—Hamas, Fatah, Islamic Jihad and the rest—who then fought one another. The Israelis, as he often pointed out, needed only to watch the Palestinians destroy themselves, as they had watched that March night from their high, dark towers.
Requiem for the olive trees
Dr Abdel Shafi was that rarest of figures, a secular and non-sectarian Palestinian leader whose integrity and outspokenness made him a model for all the rest. He was of the left, in an old socialist way, but was never a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine; a doctor's role, he seemed to believe, was to stay detached from such affiliations. Far more useful was his decision to found and direct the Gaza branch of the Red Crescent, his own rallying organisation for Palestinian improvement. The Islamists attacked him, and in 1981 burned his clinic down; he noted then, stoically, that the Israelis who then ruled Gaza did not trouble to intervene.
On both the PLO and the PLC he was a gadfly, denouncing corruption and resigning with much publicity from the PLC, in 1997, because it was doing nothing to counter Israeli ambitions. The Palestinian Authority infuriated him because it would not control the intifada and was allowing Palestinians (though, he stressed, they had every reason to rebel) to commit random violence against Jewish civilians. He never ran for president in the 1996 elections, but might have done well if he had.
Though the Israelis twice deported him and then confined him to Gaza for his long-term refusal to co-operate, he did not oppose the existence of Israel. The Jewish presence was a reality, and the Jewish state had to be accepted. Nor did he dislike Jews: at Sabbath dusks, as a boy, he had been in demand to light the lamps of his Jewish neighbours. But there had to be a spirit of “mutuality and reciprocity”: two viable states, side by side, within the 1967 borders, and no Jewish settlers on Palestinian land. Until the settlements stopped entirely, he insisted, there was no point in any peace plan for the Middle East.
This was his message at the Madrid Conference in 1991 and at the Washington talks that followed—talks which he led and which were undermined, to his disgust, by secret accords made later at Oslo between Arafat and the Israelis. His speech at Madrid was perhaps the most eloquent the West had ever heard from a Palestinian: a plea for understanding, for sympathy and for territory. “What requiem can be sung”, he asked, “for trees uprooted by army bulldozers? And...who can explain to those whose lands are confiscated and clear waters stolen, a message of peace? Remove the barbed wire. Restore the land.”
Bob Denard
Oct 18th 2007
From The Economist print edition
Bob Denard, mercenary and coup-master, died on October 13th, aged 78
THERE were usually several versions of any story involving Bob Denard. To explain how he came to be found, in the early hours of November 26th 1989, standing over the blood-soaked and pyjama-clad body of the president of the Comoros Islands, there were three alternatives. One: Mr Denard had shot him. (He denied it in court; though he had been in the same room, and very close to him, he had not pulled the trigger.) Two: the palace bodyguard had burst in wildly, filling the president with bullets. (“Inexplicable,” Mr Denard agreed, but true; “an accident arising out of a general state of madness.”) Or perhaps—mad theory three—an army commandant had fired off an anti-tank missile by mistake, which had crashed through the window of the presidential bedroom.
The French courts never worked it out, and in 1999 acquitted Mr Denard for lack of evidence. His long dark history as a mercenary in Africa, from 1961 onwards, had blurred everything about him. His name was Bob Denard, or Gilbert Bourgeaud, or Colonel Bako, or Mustafa M'hadjou. The wound that made him limp had come from a bullet in Congo, or perhaps in Algeria. His fascination with all things military sprang from a boyhood in the French resistance in the Médoc, or alternatively from his first entranced sighting of the shiny helmets, boots and guns of the German troops invading his village. He had been cashiered from the French navy, at 16, for running riot in a Saigon whorehouse or for burning down a restaurant. Fact or fiction: few knew for sure.
Mr Denard could look gentlemanly, smart in grey suits or his spurious colonel's uniform. He thought the word “mercenary” insulting and torture “repugnant”. Visitors to his beach house in the Comoros might find him, surrounded by his children from seven different pretty women, sipping tea under a frangipani tree. Dom Perignon and paté de foie gras would be shipped out after him when his plots failed. But he was also a brawny, flamboyant soldier in camouflage fatigues, leader of “les affreux” (“the terrible ones”) in the Congo—in fact, le plus affreux des affreux, as he boasted to his men. He did a job in which killing was necessary, sometimes alongside underlings who stubbed out their cigarettes on prisoners' feet or roughly removed their teeth and eyes.
Money was an attraction. When he could, he built up business interests on the side. But he said he could earn more pay as an ordinary soldier; his stronger motives were adventure, “idealism”, and the fact that he was stifling in Paris, “bored shitless”, if he didn't make war somewhere. He fought in cold-war Africa for anti-communist rulers favoured by the West, and for any regime that would help the French, as they let go their colonies, to keep their investments safe and their influence alive.
In breakaway Katanga in the 1960s Mr Denard propped up Moishe Tshombe, a creature of Belgian mining interests in Congo, against a United Nations force. He tried to launch coups in Yemen and Benin and fought for secession in Biafra. His men—usually only a few dozen of them—were generally French, Belgian or South African, well equipped with guns and armoured jeeps, whipping the untrained blacks into shape. Mr Denard himself seemed less racist than his troops, and in the Comoros, having converted to Islam, he wore the robes and cap of a native as he limped to Friday prayers. But he laughed at the thought of democracy in Africa.
An amber light
At certain times his presence was benevolent. In 1964 he and his men saved the whites of the town of Stanleyville, in Congo, from being slaughtered by a drug-crazed mob. His coup in the Comoros in 1978, one of four he engineered in the archipelago between 1975 and 1995, brought in a decade of relative stability while he took charge of the army and the economy and his Garde Presidentielle, their food and black uniforms paid for by South African money, guarded the puppet ruler. He once claimed to be acting in the higher interests of civilisation. Frederick Forsyth, in “The Dogs of War”, may have borrowed from the glamour of his character.
Yet amateurism often dogged his enterprises. Invasions were launched from rusty trawlers and inflatable dinghies and once, in Congo, on bicycles. He crashed in flames more often than he succeeded. If the South Africans did not pull him out to the safety of suburban Pretoria, a French expeditionary force, shiny and efficient, sometimes arrived to remove him before he went too far. On his last coup attempt in the Comoros, in 1995 at the age of 66, his grandfatherly arm was taken gently by French officers before he was led away to face yet more criminal investigations.
A conviction followed in 2006, but no punishment. By this time Mr Denard was ill with Alzheimer's, but there was another reason. De Gaulle's spymaster, Jacques Foccart, had first recruited him for Africa. Subsequent officials at the Elysée had provided money and passports. Asked during one trial whether he had had a green light from the government for his plots, he said no, not exactly; just an amber light, meaning that there was no opposition. He was, he liked to say, a “corsair of the Republic”, implicitly given permission to proceed with dash and without compunction. And so he did.
From The Economist print edition
Bob Denard, mercenary and coup-master, died on October 13th, aged 78
THERE were usually several versions of any story involving Bob Denard. To explain how he came to be found, in the early hours of November 26th 1989, standing over the blood-soaked and pyjama-clad body of the president of the Comoros Islands, there were three alternatives. One: Mr Denard had shot him. (He denied it in court; though he had been in the same room, and very close to him, he had not pulled the trigger.) Two: the palace bodyguard had burst in wildly, filling the president with bullets. (“Inexplicable,” Mr Denard agreed, but true; “an accident arising out of a general state of madness.”) Or perhaps—mad theory three—an army commandant had fired off an anti-tank missile by mistake, which had crashed through the window of the presidential bedroom.
The French courts never worked it out, and in 1999 acquitted Mr Denard for lack of evidence. His long dark history as a mercenary in Africa, from 1961 onwards, had blurred everything about him. His name was Bob Denard, or Gilbert Bourgeaud, or Colonel Bako, or Mustafa M'hadjou. The wound that made him limp had come from a bullet in Congo, or perhaps in Algeria. His fascination with all things military sprang from a boyhood in the French resistance in the Médoc, or alternatively from his first entranced sighting of the shiny helmets, boots and guns of the German troops invading his village. He had been cashiered from the French navy, at 16, for running riot in a Saigon whorehouse or for burning down a restaurant. Fact or fiction: few knew for sure.
Mr Denard could look gentlemanly, smart in grey suits or his spurious colonel's uniform. He thought the word “mercenary” insulting and torture “repugnant”. Visitors to his beach house in the Comoros might find him, surrounded by his children from seven different pretty women, sipping tea under a frangipani tree. Dom Perignon and paté de foie gras would be shipped out after him when his plots failed. But he was also a brawny, flamboyant soldier in camouflage fatigues, leader of “les affreux” (“the terrible ones”) in the Congo—in fact, le plus affreux des affreux, as he boasted to his men. He did a job in which killing was necessary, sometimes alongside underlings who stubbed out their cigarettes on prisoners' feet or roughly removed their teeth and eyes.
Money was an attraction. When he could, he built up business interests on the side. But he said he could earn more pay as an ordinary soldier; his stronger motives were adventure, “idealism”, and the fact that he was stifling in Paris, “bored shitless”, if he didn't make war somewhere. He fought in cold-war Africa for anti-communist rulers favoured by the West, and for any regime that would help the French, as they let go their colonies, to keep their investments safe and their influence alive.
In breakaway Katanga in the 1960s Mr Denard propped up Moishe Tshombe, a creature of Belgian mining interests in Congo, against a United Nations force. He tried to launch coups in Yemen and Benin and fought for secession in Biafra. His men—usually only a few dozen of them—were generally French, Belgian or South African, well equipped with guns and armoured jeeps, whipping the untrained blacks into shape. Mr Denard himself seemed less racist than his troops, and in the Comoros, having converted to Islam, he wore the robes and cap of a native as he limped to Friday prayers. But he laughed at the thought of democracy in Africa.
An amber light
At certain times his presence was benevolent. In 1964 he and his men saved the whites of the town of Stanleyville, in Congo, from being slaughtered by a drug-crazed mob. His coup in the Comoros in 1978, one of four he engineered in the archipelago between 1975 and 1995, brought in a decade of relative stability while he took charge of the army and the economy and his Garde Presidentielle, their food and black uniforms paid for by South African money, guarded the puppet ruler. He once claimed to be acting in the higher interests of civilisation. Frederick Forsyth, in “The Dogs of War”, may have borrowed from the glamour of his character.
Yet amateurism often dogged his enterprises. Invasions were launched from rusty trawlers and inflatable dinghies and once, in Congo, on bicycles. He crashed in flames more often than he succeeded. If the South Africans did not pull him out to the safety of suburban Pretoria, a French expeditionary force, shiny and efficient, sometimes arrived to remove him before he went too far. On his last coup attempt in the Comoros, in 1995 at the age of 66, his grandfatherly arm was taken gently by French officers before he was led away to face yet more criminal investigations.
A conviction followed in 2006, but no punishment. By this time Mr Denard was ill with Alzheimer's, but there was another reason. De Gaulle's spymaster, Jacques Foccart, had first recruited him for Africa. Subsequent officials at the Elysée had provided money and passports. Asked during one trial whether he had had a green light from the government for his plots, he said no, not exactly; just an amber light, meaning that there was no opposition. He was, he liked to say, a “corsair of the Republic”, implicitly given permission to proceed with dash and without compunction. And so he did.
Lucky Dube
Oct 25th 2007
From The Economist print edition
Lucky Dube, singer against apartheid, died on October 18th, aged 43
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.
From The Economist print edition
Lucky Dube, singer against apartheid, died on October 18th, aged 43
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.
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