📕 Tété-Michel Kpomassie, An African in Greenland
But if I were to live out my life in the Arctic, what use would it be to my fellow countrymen, to my native land? Having tried and succeeded in this polar venture, was it not my duty to return to my brothers in Africa and become the "storyteller" of this glacial land of midnight sun and endless night? After the degradation of colonization and the struggle for independence, wasn't it the task of educators to open their continent to fresh horizons? Should I not play my small part in that task and help the youth of Africa open their minds to the outside world?
I don't know if An African in Greenland is a book i'd have stumbled upon all by myself, it was curated by Katja for Reading the Globe 2026, and i'm very glad to have read it. Travelogues are rarely a genre i seek out, but this one stands apart from the tales of European travellers setting foot in a distant land.
Of course, it isn't utterly untouched by the discourses of colonialism and imperialism, for one thing, the preface is written by Jean Malaurie, a French anthropologist, who claims to have been the one who encouraged Kpomassie to write of his travels in the first place. This is a little farfetched; Kpomassie mentions writing in his diary several times over the course of the narrative, sometimes devoting entire evenings to writing.
But it isn't just Malaurie's preface, Kpomassie, over the course of his narration is a colonial subject who becomes a post-colonial subject, following Togo's independence from France in 1960. He educates himself in French as well as in English, and this in turn facilitates his journey, long in both distance and duration, to Greenland, and frames his experiences within colonial and post-colonial discourse. The author's epistemic frame is most visible when he describes the traditions of the Inuit; the text's style in these moments seems familiar, it reminded me of the observations Claude-Levi Strauss made in Tristes Tropiques, another travelogue, this time written by a trained French anthropologist.
Where Kpomassie's work differs somewhat is in the comparisons he makes of Inuk traditions to Togolese traditions, the ones he grew up with, themselves a subject of the anthropological gaze. This imparts Kpomassie's narrative a degree of alterity from the strictly European perspective, without liberating it completely from the literary field of the modern travelogue. Regardless of these considerations, i did really enjoy reading the book.