YANNICK NOAH. Singer and former tennis player Yannick Noah welcomed the President of the Republic Emmanuel Macron to Yaoundé, where he is the village chief.
[Updated July 27, 2022 at 10:14 a.m.] It was a symbolic stop on Emmanuel Macron’s African tour: a visit to Yannick Noah, in Yaoundé, where the former tennis player is village chief and where he now resides half of the year. A visit serving “for exchanges with French and Cameroonian representatives of civil society”, indicates the Elysée. The meeting between Emmanuel Macron and Yannick Noah continued in the singer’s family vault, then in the “country club”, developed by him and ended with a concert.
The President of the Republic was also able to interact with local young people, in particular to talk about democracy, education, ecology and Cameroon’s colonial past. Yannick Noah inherited the title of traditional chief after the death of his father in 2017. Very attached to this district of Yaoundé, where he lived his childhood between the ages of 2 and 12 and where he now spends six months of the year, the singer decided to contribute to its development. He notably restored the “country club”, now embellished with a bar, restaurant, tennis and basketball courts and bungalows.
Yannick Noah had a full life and career. From tennis champion to one of the most popular French singers, certain aspects of his life continue to make ink flow. This is particularly the case with his private life, which, it seems, has intrigued the French since the 1980s. Father of five children, Yannick Noah has been married three times. The first woman the sportsman married was Cecilia Rodhe, a Swedish sculptor and model. Elected Miss Sweden in 1978, she formalized her relationship with Yannick Noah with their marriage, celebrated in 1984. From this marriage were born two children: Joakim, famous professional basketball player in the United States, born in 1985 and Yéléna, born the year next.
At the time, the couple left France and went to live in New York. Yannick Noah will open a restaurant there, in Manhattan, called Guignol’s. In 1985, the same year as the birth of the couple’s daughter, they decided to separate. But even today, Yannick Noah and Cécilia Rodhe have remained on good terms, each having rebuilt their lives. After this relationship, the tennis player remarried with Heather Stewart-Whyte, with whom he had two children, Elijah and Jénayé, then with Isabelle Camus, mother of Yannick Noah’s fifth child, Joalukas.
