[2] When his mother died in 1926, he grew up as a half-orphan with foster parents, who were the operators of a human zoo and used him there from 1927, at the age of two, as an extra.

[2] He initially worked as a porter in a Berlin hotel, but was dismissed due to a guest's complaint about his skin colour.

He completed his high school diploma and studied political science in Hamburg and Paris with a degree in economics.

[4] Michael's independent study of African intellectuals, such as Kwame Nkrumah, and contemporary thought, such as Léopold Sédar Senghor's Négritude, led him to amass a personal library of nearly 700 volumes.

[4] He was also a government advisor to the SPD, a lecturer for the German Foundation for International Cooperation and a civil servant at the Federal Intelligence Service.

Erinnerungen eines Afro-Deutschen,[7] which has been translated into English as Black German: An Afro-German Life in the Twentieth Century,[8] and subsequently appeared in many television programs.

[9] In 2018, he was awarded the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany for his work as a contemporary witness to history.