Reggae Star Killed In South Africa Carjacking

JOHANNESBURG, Oct. 19 — A team of gunmen shot and killed Lucky Dube, an international reggae star and one of the nations best-known musicians, in an apparent carjacking attempt late Thursday that underscored the continuing peril of violent crime here.

As the provincial police commissioner appointed seven veteran investigators to chase down the attackers, President Thabo Mbeki called on the nation to confront this terrible scourge of crime, which has taken the lives of too many of our people, and does so every day.

The police said that Mr. Dube, 43, was shot by three hijackers in Rosettenville, just south of downtown Johannesburg, as he dropped off his 15-year-old son at his brothers house. Mr. Dubes son was in the car at the time, they said.

The hijackers fled after Mr. Dube crashed his Chrysler into a tree. He died at the scene.

The principal opposition party, the Democratic Alliance, said that the circumstances surrounding his murder again illustrate that violent crime in South Africa is out of control, and that the governments remedies to address this scourge have failed.

South Africans have reduced the murder rate by 41 percent since the nation became a democracy in 1994, experts say, but the pace of murder and other violent crimes remains among the worlds highest, and attacks on both ordinary citizens and high-profile figures, including politicians and the police, are a daily occurrence.

The government has committed to reduce so-called contact crimes, in which criminals confront their victims, by 7 percent annually. Figures for the last annual reporting period, which ended in March, showed declines in attempted murders, assaults, rape and in several other categories.

But homicides rose to 19,200, a 3.5 percent increase, reversing a longstanding drift downward. Aggravated robberies, in which criminals assault as well as rob victims, leaped by nearly 6 percent, to more than 126,000. And carjackings of the sort that killed Mr. Dube rose 6 percent, to a level not seen in four years.

Those increases reflect a disturbing shift toward violence by certain kinds of criminals, said Dr. Johan Burger, a 36-year veteran of the South African Police Service who is an analyst for the Pretoria-based Institute for Security Studies.

This is a change for the worse, he said. A psychosis of fear is spreading, and this has dangerous, dangerous implications if it is not stopped. Im not at all convinced that were doing the right thing at the moment.

While both politicians and the press were demanding more police officers to combat the rise in violent crime, he said, South Africa already exceeds international norms for the number of police needed for its population. To reduce the violence, he said, the nation needs to control illegal immigration, especially from war zones, which has fed a population of destitute aliens with military training and experience with violence.

He also said the nation needed to reduce the vast gap between the nations wealthy class and a jobless underclass that has little hope of climbing out of poverty except by crime.

On Friday, Mr. Dubes Web site, www.luckydubemusic.com, said that his death leaves a great void in the music industry as 25 years of music suddenly ends in tragedy.

Mr. Dube began as a singer of traditional African songs but swept to international stardom in the 1980s when he began singing reggae. He recorded 22 albums during his career and played with Peter Gabriel, Seal and other Western singers, but he spent most of his time in Africa, where his base of fans was strongest.

He is survived by a wife and seven children.

Tag Cloud

External Information

Additional Information

Where Am I?