Michael Jackson’s First Visit to Africa: Senegal, 1974
Michael Jackson Series · Part I of III
Like millions of people, I’ve been happily caught up in the Michael Jackson renaissance.
The huge success of Michael sent me down a rabbit hole — revisiting the music, the performances, the interviews, the sheer artistry and dedication behind a body of work I’ve loved for years. As a longtime Michael Jackson fan, there has been something genuinely joyful about watching a new generation discover him, and the rest of us rediscover what made him so extraordinary in the first place.
But somewhere down that rabbit hole, another story kept catching my attention.
Michael Jackson and Africa.
We know the global superstar. We know the Motown beginnings, Thriller, the moonwalk, the record-breaking tours and the cultural phenomenon. But his relationship with Africa — the visits, the encounters, the connections he made with the continent at different moments of his life — is a chapter we don’t talk about nearly as much.
So, on what would have been Michael Jackson’s 68th birthday, I wanted to go back to that story.
This is the first of a three-part series tracing Michael Jackson’s relationship with Africa.
And it begins in 1974, when a 15-year-old Michael Jackson arrived in Dakar, Senegal, and set foot on the continent for the first time.
And something shifted.
The Jackson 5 Arrive in Senegal
By 1974, the Jackson 5 were already a global phenomenon. They had hit records, sold-out tours, magazine covers. Jacksonmania — that particular brand of breathless, screaming, fainting adoration — was very much in motion.
But Dakar was different.
What greeted them was not just the usual crowd frenzy. It was a full cultural welcome: traditional Senegalese dancers and drummers lining up to receive them, rhythms filling the air, bodies moving in patterns that had been handed down across generations.
Michael Jackson watched, and reportedly could not stop watching.
By his own later accounts, something about those performers stopped him completely. Not in the way fame stops you — not because of recognition or spectacle. He was stopped by something deeper. Something that felt, unexpectedly, like memory.
“This Is Where It Comes From”
The words that Michael is said to have spoken in that moment are simple, but they carry weight.
This is where the rhythm comes from. This is where the music comes from. This is where the talent comes from.
For a teenager whose entire identity was built around music, movement and performance, this was not a small realisation. It was the beginning of understanding that the gifts he had spent his childhood refining were not his alone — they were inherited. They were part of something ancient and unbroken, something that had crossed the Atlantic and survived.
Long before phrases like diaspora connection or cultural roots became part of mainstream vocabulary, a fifteen-year-old Michael Jackson was having the experience those words try to describe.
That matters.
Gorée Island and the Weight of History
The visit to Gorée Island is the part of this story I find myself returning to most.
Situated just off the coast of Dakar, Gorée has long been one of the most significant — and painful — historical sites on the continent. For generations, it has stood as a place of remembrance for the transatlantic slave trade: its corridors carrying the weight of millions of stories, millions of names, millions of lives uprooted.
Visitors do not go to Gorée for tourism. They go to confront something.
Michael went. And by his own later reflections, it stayed with him.
Standing in a place so directly connected to the history of African people and their descendants around the world — to his history — clearly left a mark. He spoke about it years afterwards in terms that suggest it was less a visit and more a reckoning.
What Gorée seemed to crystallise for him was something the drumming and dancing had already begun to suggest: that Black culture across the Atlantic — the music, the rhythm, the performance, the resilience — was not separate from Africa. It was Africa, in another form, still living.
Why This Visit Still Matters
It is tempting to look back at this trip and file it under interesting celebrity trivia. But that would be a mistake.
This was not a superstar doing a goodwill appearance. This was a young Black artist encountering his heritage in the most tangible way imaginable — through sound, through movement, through the physical experience of a place. And it happened before the world-changing fame, before Thriller, before everything.
It was the first chapter of a relationship with Africa that would continue throughout Michael Jackson’s life — through his return in 1992, his coronation as Sami by the Sanwi people of Krindjabo in Côte d’Ivoire, his visits to South Africa, his presence at the Kora Awards. All of that came later.
But it started here. In Dakar, with a boy who heard the drums and recognised something in them.
THE NZINGA TAKE
Here is what I keep thinking about when I sit with this story.
The rhythms that moved Michael Jackson in Senegal in 1974 had already made an extraordinary journey. They had crossed oceans under unimaginable conditions. They had been stripped of their names, their context, their original geography — and yet they had survived. They had evolved into jazz, into blues, into soul, into funk, into gospel, into pop. They had come back to the world in new forms and moved millions of people who did not always know what they were responding to.
Michael Jackson knew, in that moment in Dakar. Or he began to know.
And that, to me, is what makes this story worth telling — not just as music history or celebrity biography, but as a reminder of what diaspora actually means when you strip away the academic language.
It means something travelled. It means something held. It means, sometimes, a fifteen-year-old boy hears a drumbeat on the other side of the world and says: I know this.
Before Africa crowned Michael Jackson, Africa reminded him where he came from.
Part II: When Africa Crowned a King — Michael Jackson, Côte d’Ivoire and the 1992 coronation in the Kingdom of Sanwi · Coming soon.
Part III: The Last African Chapter — South Africa, the Kora Awards and Michael Jackson’s enduring legacy · Coming soon.
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Sources & Further Reading
- Michael Jackson — Moonwalk (Penguin Random House)
- Ebony Magazine — Michael Jackson Interview, May 1992 (archived by MJFrance)
- On Michael Jackson’s Footsteps — The Jackson 5 in Africa, 1974
- Michael Jackson Ultimate Archive — 1974 Timeline
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