Senegalese musician Youssou N'Dour

THE ARTIST WHOM ROLLING Stone Magazine has called “perhaps the most famous singer alive” is celebrating his fiftieth birthday today. Youssou N’Dour was born in Dakar, Senegal to pious Sufi Muslim parents on October 1, 1959. He got his start performing at local gatherings in the capital’s rough-and-tumble Medina area, sometimes playing pirate gigs on the parking lots outside Dakar night clubs. At age twelve he was already performing on stage and on radio with the popular Star Band. In 1979 N’Dour set up his own group, Étoile de Dakar, later renamed Super Étoile, which soon became the best-known band in all of Africa.

N’Dour is a pioneer of Afrobeat and a genre of Senegalese music called Mbalax, which combines jazz, Latin, soul, rock, and traditional West African rhythms and is sung in Wolof. His unique version of African fusion also contains a vital spiritual element. N’Dour is descended from a long line of griots – the traditional Sufi bards of Western Africa – on his mother’s side of the family and he has made a lifelong study of Sufi music and literature. He is a member of the Mouride Brotherhood, a devout Sufi movement that claims four million adherents in the country and many thousands abroad. The Mourides trace their beliefs to Sufi spiritual leader Ahmadou Bamba, who resisted Senegal’s French occupiers with peaceful means and propagated an ethos of hard work and prayer in the early part of the twentieth century. The message of N’Dour’s music is always that “Islam is tolerance and peace.” Nevertheless, he has raised controversy by blending popular music and religion, two ingredients that many Muslims believe should never be mixed.

 
N'Dour's album The Guide (1995)

Youssou N’Dour was already a star in his native country when Peter Gabriel heard him perform at a concert in Paris and began touring with him before a global audience. His music covers a vast range of styles, from traditional Senegalese tunes to modern rock, all sung with a distinctive tenor voice that encompasses a full five octaves. He has recorded with some of the biggest names in the music industry, including Gabriel, Paul Simon, Sting, Bruce Springsteen, Tracy Chapman, and Branford Marsalis. According to the program notes on his album “Set” (1990), N’Dour’s music “will make you think globally as you dance locally.”

In 1989, he and Gabriel collaborated on the hit song “Shaking the Tree.” N’Dour’s recording of “Seven Seconds” with Nineh Cherry in 1994 stayed on global charts for almost half a year. Following the release of “Set,” Brian Cullman wrote in Rolling Stone that “if any Third World performer has a real shot at the sort of universal popularity last enjoyed by Bob Marley, it’s Youssou, a singer with a voice so extraordinary that the history of Africa seems locked inside it.”

He has been politically active for decades, organizing a concert on behalf of Nelson Mandela in 1985 and touring for Amnesty International in 1988. He has also worked with the International Red Cross, the Jubilee 2000 Committee for the Cancellation of Third World Debt, global campaigns against hunger and malaria, and the United Nations anti-landmine campaign. In 2006, N’Dour appeared in the historical movie Amazing Grace as the African-British abolitionist Olaudah Equiano and also created much of the music for the film. He is currently involved in projects to help stop illegal immigration to Europe and to promote open source health applications to Africa. Alongside Mandela and Kofi Annan, N’Dour is probably the most influential and certainly best-known African alive today.

N’Dour probably could have gone much farther than he already has if he had moved, say, to London and abandoned his beloved Wolof to sing only in English - in other words, if he had “sold out.” But instead he has stayed close to his roots.  N’Dour still makes his home in Dakar, where he remains committed to his Mouride faith and to helping raise Africa up to its peoples’ full potential. As his song goes:

So happy birthday, Youssou N’Dour! And many happy returns.