Wyclef Jean to Run for
President of Haiti By Tim Padgett / Port-au-Prince UPDATED: 08/04/2010
Wyclef Jean, photographed in New
York City on Aug. 2, 2010 Hip-hop, more than most pop
genres, is something of a pulpit,
urban fire and brimstone garbed in
baggy pants and backward caps. So
it's little wonder that one of the
music form's icons, Haitian-American superstar Wyclef Jean, is the son of
a Nazarene preacher - or that he
likens himself, as a child of the
Haitian diaspora, to a modern-day
Moses, destined to return and lead
his people out of bondage. Haiti's Jan. 12 earthquake, which ravaged
the western hemisphere's poorest
country and killed more than
200,000 people, was the biblical
event that sealed his calling. After
days of helping ferry mangled Haitian corpses to morgues, Jean
felt as if he'd "finished the journey
from my basket in the bulrushes to
standing in front of the burning
bush," he told me this week. "I
knew I'd have to take the next step." That would be running for President
of Haiti. Jean told TIME he is going
to announce his candidacy for the
Nov. 28 election just days before
the Aug. 7 deadline. One plan that
was discussed, loaded with as much Mosaic symbolism as a news cycle
can hold, called for him to declare
his candidacy on Aug. 5 upon
arriving in Port-au-Prince from New
York City, where he grew up after
leaving Haiti with his family at age 9. "If not for the earthquake, I
probably would have waited another
10 years before doing this," Jean
says. "The quake drove home to
me that Haiti can't wait another 10
years for us to bring it into the 21st century." Jean sees no contradiction
between his life as an artist and his
ambitions as a politician. "If I can't
take five years out to serve my
country as President," he argues,
"then everything I've been singing about, like equal rights, doesn't
mean anything." It's tempting to dismiss this as flaky
performance art, a publicity stunt
from the same guy who just a few
years ago recorded a number called
"President" that included the refrain
"If I was President." But Jean's chances as well as his motives
seem solid. And there are good
reasons for Haitians - and the U.S.-
led international donor community,
which is bankrolling Haiti's long slog
to the 21st century - to take this particular hip-hop politician seriously.
Pop-culture celebrity hardly
disqualifies you from high office
today. (The last time I looked, an
action hero was still running
California.) And in Haiti, where half the population of about 9 million is
under age 25, it's an asset as
golden as a rapper's chains. Amid
Haiti's gray postquake rubble, Jean
is far more popular with that young
cohort than their chronically corrupt and inept mainstream politicians are,
and he'll likely galvanize youth
participation in the election
