Uganda: Here Comes the Preacher's Son

Uganda: Here Comes the Preacher's Son

The Monitor (Kampala)

1 August 2008
Posted to the web 1 August 2008

Wyclef Jean will be performing at Lugogo Cricket Oval this weekend. Rafsanjan Abbey Tatya takes you through his dramatic life since he first came on the world scene with the Fugees.

Wyclef Jean will be performing at Lugogo Cricket Oval.

"Ready or not. Here I come. You can't hide..." does anybody remember these lyrics? They are from the Fugees' song Ready Or Not and former Fugees' singer Wyclef Jean is here and ready to perform at the Lugogo Cricket Oval tonight.

Starting out as a member of the phenomenally successful Fugees, Wyclef has gone on to release platinum solo albums. In addition to singing, rapping and playing the guitar, he has established himself as an accomplished composer, arranger and producer.

All Wyclef's collaborations have turned out to be hits and there was a point in time when it was believed that whoever wanted to make a hit only needed to talk to him about a duet. The list includes songs like L.O.V.E with Eve, 911 featuring Mary J. Blige, Hips Don't Lie with Shakira and Sweetest Girl featuring Akon and Lil Wayne, to mention but a few.

Born Nelust Wyclef Jean in Croix-des-Bouquets, Haiti, he was named Wyclef Jean by his foster father, a pastor who re-named him after John Wycliffe. He moved with his family to Brooklyn, New York when he was nine, then to northern New Jersey where he currently stays.

"I was raised with this training from the church and the streets and the parks, and it's what developed me as a person and as an artiste," Wyclef told Askmen.com.

By the time he entered high school, Wyclef had moved to New Jersey and taken up music - his mother bought him his first guitar. He studied jazz in high school and, in 1987; he formed a group with his cousin Prakazrel Michel a.k.a Pras and Michel's high school classmate, Lauryn Hill.

Initially, they called themselves the Tranzlator Crew, but by the time they signed with Ruffhouse Records in 1993, they were the Fugees, their name taken from the slang for refugees. Their debut single Blunted On Reality in 1994, attracted little attention but their sophomore release The Score (1996), featuring hits as Killing Me Softly and Fu-Gee-La, was a staggering success.

With worldwide sales of over 16 million copies, The Score became one of the top-selling and most influential hip-hop albums ever. By 2000, the Fugees had yet to record a follow-up to The Score, fuelling rumours of tension between the group members and Wyclef was the first "Fugee" to strike out on a solo career, which he did as soon as the group stopped touring and promoting The Score. In 1997, he released Wyclef Jean Presents the Carnival, which went triple-platinum and earned him a Grammy nomination for its single, Gone Till November.

The album's guests included Hill and Pras along with Jean's siblings Melky Sedeck and Farel Sedeck Guerschom Jean, the I Threes (back-up vocals for Bob Marley), The Neville Brothers and Celia Cruz.

In between his multi-platinum records, Wyclef founded his own record label Yclef in 2000.

In 2002, Jean then continued his eclectic stylings on Masquerade, which featured re-workings of Bob Dylan's Knockin On Heaven's Door and Frankie Valli's What A Night, as well as Daddy, a tribute to Jean's father, who died in 2001.

For the next few years, Wyclef worked as a producer, songwriter, and re-mixer for a wide range of artistes. His collaborators included Destiny's Child, Whitney Houston, Michael Jackson, Mya, Santana, Kimberly Scott, Sinad O'Connor, Mick Jagger, and Canibus.

But then he also entered the big screen world and wrote and produced songs for the sound track to Jonathan Demme's 2003 documentary The Agronomist, about the Haitian activist and radio personality Jean Dominique. With Jerry Wonder Duplessis, Wycleff also composed the score for the 2004 documentary Ghosts of Cité Soleil, in which he also appears on screen speaking on the telephone to a gang-leader and aspiring rapper, Winston "2Pac" Jean.

Humanitarian

Besides featuring in several TV shows, Wyclef has also participated and organised numerous benefit concerts for a variety of causes, including aid to his motherland Haiti.

He founded the Wyclef Jean Foundation to help children both in Haiti and the United States, and has a special concern for those growing up in crime-ridden housing projects.

"I'm just one of those people who cares," Wyclef explains, "and will always care because there's too much going on." In 2005, he established the Yéle Haiti Foundation and in its first year of operation, the foundation provided scholarships to 3,600 children in Gonaives after the devastation by Hurricane Jeane. In its third year of operation, it is doubling the amount of the scholarships and spreading them throughout Haiti.

On the Fugees' single Ready Or Not, Wyclef sings, "If I could rule the world, everyone would have a gun in the ghetto of course," and he says it is not a violent remark but rather a sign of how much he sympathises with the underprivileged.

He married Haitian-American fashion designer Marie Claudinette Pierre-Jean in 1994 and they have one daughter, Angelina Claudinelle, whom they adopted from the US in 2005 when she was three-days-old. The daughter is half Haitian and half Guyanese and though Wyclef is friends with actress Angelina Jolie, he says that the daughter was not named after the Mr & Mrs Smith star but simply for the fact that the girl is "an angel." He shares a passion for humanitarian work with his friend Jolie.

The show

Wyclef is here to perform during the re-branding of telecommunications company Celtel to Zain. DJ Benny, who is widely recognised as the most entertaining DJ in the world, will spin the discs for Wyclef Jean. He is no stranger to the Ugandan crowd as he was here with Akon in May.

With Shs35,000, you can be part of the big event at Lugogo Cricket Oval.