Michael Jackson Series · Part II of III
In 1974, a teenage Michael Jackson stepped off a plane in Dakar and said, ‘this is where I come from.’
Eighteen years later, Africa answered him back. This is the story of Michael Jackson in Côte d’Ivoire — not as a visiting superstar, but as a man received, welcomed, and ultimately crowned. Part two of our series picks up where Senegal left off, tracing how one kingdom’s gesture turned a homecoming into something far more permanent: belonging, made official.
I want to stay here a little longer. Because what happened in Côte d’Ivoire in 1992 was not a publicity stunt, not a celebrity moment, and not — as some Western outlets framed it at the time — an eccentric distraction. It was something much older and much more meaningful than any of those descriptions allow for.
It was a homecoming. And Africa knew it, even if the rest of the world didn’t quite know what to do with that.
The Man Who Arrived in 1992
By 1992, Michael Jackson had already lived several lifetimes’ worth of public existence. Thriller had become the best-selling album in history. The Bad tour had broken records across five continents. Dangerous had just been released, and the world was — once again — paying close attention to everything he did.
He arrived in West Africa that year carrying all of that. But he also arrived with something the headlines rarely acknowledged: a genuine, longstanding interest in the continent.
This was not his first time on African soil. Part I of this series tells the story of the 1974 Senegal visit — the one that began everything, the one where a fifteen-year-old Michael heard the drums and understood something profound about where he came from. By 1992, eighteen years had passed. Michael was no longer a teenager discovering his roots. Instead, it was a grown man, returning.
He had spoken publicly about Africa’s influence on his work. He had expressed interest in humanitarian causes across the continent. His connection was not manufactured for press cycles. It had a history.
And Africa received him accordingly.
The Reception
Before Côte d’Ivoire, there was Gabon.
The scenes that greeted Michael Jackson in Libreville were extraordinary by any measure. Crowds lined the streets. The president, Omar Bongo, received him personally. Tens of thousands of people turned out to welcome someone who, in the eyes of much of the Western world, was simply a pop star on a foreign visit.
But that framing missed something important.
For many Africans, Michael Jackson was not simply a pop star. He was a product of the African diaspora — someone whose artistry, whose movement, whose very presence on a stage carried the unmistakable influence of African rhythm, African performance tradition, African spirit. Welcoming him was not the same as welcoming a foreign celebrity.
It was closer to welcoming something that had been sent out into the world and was finally coming back.
Krindjabo and the Kingdom of Sanwi
From Gabon, Michael travelled to Côte d’Ivoire. And it is here that the story takes the turn that I find most extraordinary.
The Kingdom of Sanwi is a real, historically significant kingdom located in the southeastern region of Côte d’Ivoire. Its people, the Sanwi, have maintained their royal traditions and their sense of distinct cultural identity across generations and colonial disruptions alike. The kingdom’s capital is Krindjabo — a small town, not a major city, not a place most international journalists would have visited or known to look for.
And yet it is in Krindjabo that something remarkable happened.
Michael Jackson was received by the royal court of the Sanwi people and formally honoured with the title of Sami — an honorary kingship. It was not a performance, neither was not a photo opportunity arranged by a PR team. It was a deliberate, culturally significant act on the part of a people with their own deep understanding of lineage, ancestry and the African diaspora.
To bestow that title was to say something specific: you are not a stranger here. You are part of this. You belong to a story that includes us.
The ceremony drew crowds and emotional scenes. Michael, by multiple accounts, was visibly moved.
I wonder sometimes what it must have felt like — to have spent your entire life being the most watched person on earth, and to arrive somewhere and be told not that you are famous, but that you are family.
What Western Media Got Wrong
The coverage that followed in much of the Western press was, predictably, reductive.
The coronation was treated as curiosity — colourful, exotic, slightly baffling. Some outlets reported it with barely concealed amusement. The assumption embedded in much of that coverage was that this was a transaction: a small African kingdom gaining attention by associating itself with a global celebrity, and a celebrity gaining an unusual accessory for his personal mythology.
That framing fundamentally misunderstood what was happening.
The Sanwi people were not starstruck. They were making a statement about identity, about diaspora, about the relationship between Africa and the descendants of Africans who had been taken from the continent centuries earlier. They were saying: this thread has not broken. We can still recognise each other. We can still name each other.
That is not celebrity spectacle. That is history.
And perhaps the reason it was so difficult for Western media to process is precisely because it operated on a frequency they were not equipped to hear.
The Deeper Meaning of Belonging
I grew up in Lubumbashi. I have lived across the continent and in the diaspora. I know what it means to carry an African identity through spaces that do not always know what to do with it.
And I know what it means — at a bone-deep level — to arrive somewhere and be seen. Not as a curiosity. Not as an outsider. But as someone who belongs to a longer story than the one currently playing out in the room.
That, I think, is what Krindjabo gave Michael Jackson.
A place in a lineage.
For someone who had spent his entire adult life being mythologised, packaged and projected onto by the world, being received as a member of a specific human family — with specific ancestors, a specific history, a specific place on the map — must have been something else entirely.
THE HOUSE OF NZINGA TAKE
We talk a lot, in Pan-African spaces, about the idea of return. The Year of Return. Going back to the motherland. Tracing your roots. And there is something genuinely powerful in all of that.
But I think what the 1992 Côte d’Ivoire story reminds us is that return is not always geographic.
Sometimes it is ceremonial. Sometimes it is a drumbeat in Dakar in 1974. Sometimes it is a kingdom in southeastern Côte d’Ivoire choosing to name you — to say, publicly and with full cultural authority: you are part of this.
Identity is not static. It does not stay in the place it was born. It travels across oceans, changes form, absorbs new languages and new experiences, and still — sometimes, in the most unexpected moments — finds its way back to something it recognises as home.
Michael Jackson found something in Krindjabo that the world’s most famous stages could not give him.
That is the part of the story worth remembering.
The crown was symbolic. The recognition was not.
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