In February 1992, a radio reporter living in Ivory Coast pushed her microphone through the open crack of Michael Jackson’s limo window and shouted a question. How did he like Africa?
Thousands of fans had lined the main road from the airport into the city that week, all hoping for a look at him. Getting close was nearly impossible. She later joked that meeting him was “more like a long glimpse after waiting and waiting and waiting.”
Later, she and a few other reporters huddled around her tape recorder to see if she’d caught anything. She had. Four words, in the softest little voice: “Beautiful, I love it.”
That same reporter was also there for the part of the trip people in Ivory Coast still treasure.
In Krindjabo, a small village in the southeast corner of the country near the border with Ghana, the local chiefs had decided Michael belonged with them. Some in the village reportedly believed his family line traced back to their own royal family. They wanted to make him one of their chiefs.
Michael was 33. People had been calling him the King of Pop for a while by then, and now a real kingdom was about to agree.
So he sat down on a golden stool beneath the village’s sacred tree. The chiefs wrapped him in a bright, handwoven kente cloth that hung like a toga. Then the drums started, and the villagers danced around him.
“The atmosphere was electric,” the reporter later wrote for NPR. She said Michael seemed “electrified by the rhythms, drumming and dancing of the villagers.”
He’d felt that pull before. Describing his very first trip to Africa years earlier, Michael remembered the drums that greeted him at the airport and said, “This is where I come from. The origin.”
Now the chiefs were ready for the biggest moment of the day. Keep your eyes on Michael’s face for this one.
The moment the chiefs crown Michael
It goes by fast, so you might want to watch it twice.
Afterward, Michael reportedly thanked everyone in both French and English, then signed papers to make the honor official. The village also reportedly gave him a royal name of his own, Amalaman Anoh.
This old tape from the same trip follows Michael through more of Africa and gives you a closer look at that crown.
More of Michael’s 1992 trip to Africa
Michael didn’t say much in public about the crown. When a magazine asked him about it, he reportedly said, “I never try to think hard about it because I don’t want it to go to my head. But, it’s a great honor.”
The people of Krindjabo felt honored too. The ones who watched him sit beneath their sacred tree that day have treasured the memory ever since.