The arrival after 8 years in that much-dreamed land and the desire to return there at the age of 80 to live the last part of life there
Some decisions can affect and define an entire life as well as some journeys to lands and cultures thousands of kilometers away. And that's what happened to Tété-Michel Kpomassie, today 80 years old, who at the age of 16 began an incredible adventure from Togo to Greenland, alone. Eight years of travel towards the discovery of an ancestral land to become, unwittingly, the first African to land in those frozen lands. An expensive place where Tete wants to return, probably in the time of a plane flight from Paris where she resides.
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The beginning of a unique and iconic journey
In the local community where Tété-Michel Kpomassie lived, Lomé, he had developed a deep fear and aversion to the pythons that had bitten him. While recovering, he read a book on a distant land of ice and inhabited by hunters, without snakes. It was a shock. An incredible journey begins with an escape, worthy of an explorer of yesteryear: Tété crossed the Ivory Coast, Ghana, Mauritania and Senegal with stops in Morocco and Algeria before arriving on a boat in the south of France, and then through Europe before boarding another boat from Copenhagen. Eight days later, at noon on June 27, 1965, he landed in Qaqortoq, a small town in southern Greenland.
The arrival in Greenland
He had finally arrived in that land he had dreamed of so much, in a place without frightening animals and also without colonial impositions. When he got off that ship he was carrying you lived like chocolate, coffee and cigarettes after the long and isolated winter, the reactions to the sight of Kpomassie were different between those who thought he was wearing a mask, who was scared and who shouted "beautiful".
The contradictions of a mystical land
This traveler, in his diaries, had noted everything. The places he visited, the people he met who had helped him, the cultural differences between his village and Greenland. But also the discovery that that remote land had in turn been colonized by various European influences with local beliefs were undermined and supplanted by those imported from other populations in addition to the introduction of tobacco, coffee and alcohol. Tété-Michel began to travel again, heading far north to finally arrive in the most desolate areas where he found the freedom he was looking for, a muffled atmosphere made of snow, frozen sea, prohibitive temperatures, only the local inhabitants and the Northern Lights.
From that trip a best-selling book was born, An African in Greenland, first published in French in 1977 and translated into 10 languages to which Portuguese and Mandarin will soon be added. Tété-Michel Kpomassie then went to live in Paris, he found himself with a friend who was his greatest supporter many years earlier, he became a lecturer and popularizer. Since then he has returned to Greenland three times and now, close to 81 candles, he hopes to be able to live the last part of his life there. Provided that the local government allows him to buy a house as, to date, only the Danes can buy property.
It is there that he would like to write a second book, about his childhood in Africa, and be buried near an iceberg.
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