We celebrate Obert Dube and his Pan African spirit. In recent years, he composed moving eulogies and tributes to African leaders including Kenneth Kaunda, John P. Magufuli and Samia S. Hassan and others, as seen rapidly gaining followers on YouTube.

Obert Dube was born in 1984 in rural Matabeleland, in the northern province of Zimbabwe. He and his six siblings were raised by a single mother after his father died when he was aged 13. When his mother also passed away ten years later, Obert took responsibility to raise and educate his brothers and sisters. When he started pursuing poetry and spoken word as a source of living, no one supported him as they said it was a waste of time. He was criticized by everyone until they saw his name in Zimbabwe`s Chronicle newspaper and later also on national television.

Obert formed a small music group with friends, named “Insizwa Ezimnyama” (the Black guys). After being spotted by the Victoria Falls Ubuntu Bomuntu group, he joined and sang with them for five years. In the meantime he worked in various hotels, but kept getting fired as his employers said he was ‘too talkative’. In 2009, Obert started teaching at his former school, Mosi oa Tunya. His poetry career began when he was requested to compose a piece for the Director of Ceremonies. Everyone was impressed and he was invited to do the same for various functions, where he was seen by heads of state. Finally after meeting other Zimbabwean musicians he was encouraged to write and record his first album, “Uhambo Lwami“ which won him Zimbabwe’s outstanding poet award.

Speaking truth to power and several albums later, with acclaim from PLO Lumumba, Mzwakhe Mbuli and other role model icons and winning the Pan African Poet of the Year Award in Cameroun in 2020, as they say, the rest is history!