Putting his lucrative recording and touring career on hold in response to what he called a “supreme patriotic duty,” the Senegalese singer-songwriter Youssou N’Dour announced late Monday that he was running for president of his country.
For a long time, men and women have demonstrated their optimism, dreaming of a new Senegal,” Mr. N’Dour, 52, said in a statement broadcast on the television and radio network he owns. “They have in various ways called for my candidacy in the February presidential race. I listened. I heard.”
The country, one of Africa’s democratic bastions, was buffeted by unrest over the summer after the president, Abdoulaye Wade, pushed for constitutional changes that would have almost ensured him a third term. After street protests, he backed down from seeking the changes, but is still running in the election.
Mr. N’Dour, a giant in the genre known as “world music” who won a Grammy in 2005, is joining a crowded field, and at a late date, just eight weeks before the first round of balloting. Nearly a dozen other candidates have built campaign organizations that have been up and functioning for months.
But Mr. N’Dour, who lives in Dakar, is the only candidate who is also a pop star with an international following. He is also an entrepreneur who has taken money earned from the more than 30 albums he has made in a solo career that spans 25 years and invested heavily in his homeland, where income per capita is barely $1,000 a year.
Mr. N’Dour’s main challenge, political analysts said, is to translate his international popularity into votes. That is likely to prove a challenge, they suggested, even with the almost universal name recognition he enjoys in Senegal.
“Because of his success, he is the most popular artist in the whole history of Senegal,” said Mamadou Diouf, a Senegalese scholar who is director of the Institute for African Studies at the Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs. “But it’s going to be hard for him to advance even to the runoff because he doesn’t have political experience or an organization.”
In addition, the main style of music on which Mr. N’Dour draws, known as mbalax, is a traditional one that does not have an especially strong following among people 25 or under, who constitute about two-thirds of Senegal’s population. They prefer hip-hop, and it has been rappers who have been especially important in voicing dissatisfaction with Mr. Wade and the problems that have proliferated under his rule, such as unemployment and power blackouts.
“Youssou is coming from the world of Peter Gabriel and Bono,” Mr. Diouf said. “He has been supplanted by the rappers.”
Mr. N’Dour has, however, emerged in recent years as an outspoken critic of Mr. Wade, whose years in office have been marked by widespread accusations of corruption, nepotism, constraints on freedom of expression and personal enrichment. Despite those problems, the protests that erupted this summer — complete with tear gas and tire burnings — were unusual in a West African country where power has never been seized in a coup, making it a rarity in the region.
Since the end of European colonialism, musicians have often served as voices of conscience and protest in independent African nations, criticizing corruption and dictatorship. The best-known example was Fela Kuti of Nigeria, the main creator of the Afropop style in the 1970s and a ferocious opponent of military rule in his country.
Still, Mr. N’Dour’s plunge into electoral politics is an unusual move for an African entertainment celebrity. Mr. Kuti announced plans to seek the presidency in 1979 and 1983, but was disqualified both times.
In some other developing countries, especially those in Latin America and the Caribbean, that kind of crossover is more common and accepted, however. The current president of Haiti, for example, is Michel Martelly, a singer known in his performing days as Sweet Micky. He was elected last year in a race in which the rapper Wyclef Jean also threw his hat in the ring, only to be disqualified because he did not meet residency requirements.
In Senegal, the sitting president, Mr. Wade, who gives his age as 85, is already trying to play down his latest rival’s importance and chances. The implication is that Mr. N’Dour, who has sung of the importance of education but began working as a professional musician at the age of 12, has neither the experience, education nor program needed to lead a struggling country of 12.5 million people.
“We’re waiting for all the candidates, including Youssou N’Dour, to detail their policy ideas,” Amadou Sall, a spokesman for Mr. Wade, said, according to Reuters, “and not just list a string of wishes.”
In announcing his candidacy, Mr. N’Dour acknowledged those shortcomings. But he laid claim to other virtues, presenting himself as a self-made man whose standing in the outside world would help bring Senegal attention and investment.
“It’s true that I haven’t pursued higher education,” but “I have proved my competence, commitment, rigor and efficiency time and time again,” he said. “I have studied at the school of the world. Travel teaches as much as books.”
Mr. N’Dour has long been active in political causes, both at home and abroad. In the late 1980s, for instance, he joined Sting, Bruce Springsteen and other pop stars on a world tour in support of Amnesty International and human rights.
More recently, as a good-will ambassador for the United Nations, he has focused on African issues like the crisis in the Darfur region of Sudan, the dangers of emigrating illegally to Europe, broadening Internet access throughout Africa and improving health care.
Initially allies, Mr. N’Dour and the president broke around the middle of the last decade. When Mr. N’Dour applied for a license to open his television station, approval was held up for two years, with Mr. Wade explaining an initial rejection as an attempt to prevent “foreigners” from influencing Senegalese policies. When the station finally went on the air in 2010, it was ordered to limit its programming to “cultural” matters.
Despite his long involvement in social and political issues, Mr. N’Dour has in the past shied away from pursuing a traditional political career. In an interview with The Guardian in 2007, he argued that being both an artist and a politician were incompatible, at least if one tried to pursue both roles at the same time.
“I want to use my music to deliver a political message and sometimes to denounce,” he said then, “but I don’t want to be a politician. In politics, sometimes you have to lie or you make a promise that you cannot keep. I can’t square that with my artistic feeling. Politics is politics; art is art. If you play a political role, you have to stop being an artist.”
