An African in Greenland

Tété-Michel Kpomassie

2 ideas

1. Togolese teenager flees python cult for Greenland

   Around 1958, after a snake encounter in a coconut palm, Tété-Michel Kpomassie's father arranged for him to be initiated into a python cult. He had just read a mission-bookshop book about the Inuit, so he ran away instead, working odd jobs northward through West Africa and then France, Germany and Denmark for about eight years. He reached Greenland in 1965 and lived with Inuit families from the south coast up to the Upernavik district.

2. Ethnography with the observer's direction reversed

   Kpomassie is an African studying an Arctic people, so he measures Inuit life against Togolese village customs rather than European norms. That makes practices like communal eating, spirit beliefs and taboos read as familiar kinship patterns instead of exotic primitivism. It also turns the observer into the object of study, as Greenlanders who had never seen a Black man crowd around to stare at and touch him.

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