Stranger in a Strange Land

Jeffrey Meyers

Greenland is in the news.  President Trump wants to take over the country.  But Denmark, which rules the largest island in the world, and the Greenlanders themselves, don’t want to be taken over.  Few people, including the Danes, have ever been to Greenland, which remains a terra incognita.  A rare exception is Tété-Michel Kpomassie, who describes his amazing pilgrimage and acceptance by the local people in his charming, lively and amusing An African in Greenland (1983).

Kpomassie was born in tiny, tropical Togo, West Africa, in 1941, one of 27 children borne by his father’s eight wives.  Inspired by reading Robert Gessain’s The Eskimos from Greenland to Alaska (1947), he was “lured by the distant unknown” and pursued his recurrent dream.  A lonely pilgrim, he made his way north by working for eight years from Togo, through Guinea, Dakar, Marseille and Bonn, to Copenhagen.  In 1965 he finally reached Greenland, which had only 35,000 people.  He then traveled by dogsled and ship more than 1,000 miles up the west coast from Julianehab to Thule.

Some of the children screamed when they saw the tall Black man, the first African to visit their country.  At night they would creep up to this stranger and “run their fingers through my fuzzy hair to make sure it was real.”  Adults, fascinated and hospitable, offered him food, drink and attractive women.  He confesses, “The sharing of bedmates among friends was unquestionably tempting, and I was quite willing to share other men’s girls—but not my own.”

In one family the daughter tells him, “My father likes you very much, and so do I.”  When he’s placed in bed next to the host’s pregnant daughter, who doesn’t know who fathered her child, he wonders if the unusual sleeping arrangements encourage incest.  He adds that “on the common sleeping platform children regularly witness their parents’ sexual activities.  The reactions of these little ones are varied.  Some deliberately start crying to interrupt the act, while others, prevented from sleeping, ask their parents to make less noise.”

During his 18-month-long stay the careful, continually alert observer gives an insider’s view of Greenland society.  He eats delicious reindeer meat as well as raw whale skin, blood-tinged seal blubber that tastes like candle wax, and the raw flesh of dogs and birds.  Kpomassie notes the odd sense of humor: “the tendency to ridicule people [including the author] is one of the qualities Greenlanders most appreciate.”  They laugh at him when he falls off a dogsled, injures his foot and hobbles through the village.

The adventurous traveler goes ice-fishing and collects ice for drinking water.  He hunts with huskies and dog sleds for seals, whales, Arctic foxes and polar bears, and uses their skins for clothing.  The seals keep the thick ice open with their claws, their teeth and their warm breath.  The starving dogs not only eat each other, but also attack small children.  Dog meat, when boiled for four hours, becomes as tender as mutton.

The son of the equatorial forest “adapts astonishingly well to the rigors of the Nordic climate, which is 75 degrees colder than Africa.  In the long winter months, lit by oil lamps and flashlights, he is “cut off from the rest of the world by the ice already covering the sea.”  In the winter some locals suffer from “polar hysteria,” alternating between passive listlessness and unbridled drunken fury when they smash everything within reach.

Kpomassie’s writing can be lyrical and savage.  On an ice-fishing expedition, “we slashed the shark open with a knife, giving him part of his own entrails to chew on . . . to prevent him from trying to bite any of us.”  Their “queer customs” include the voluntary suicide of old people who would encumber the essential seasonal migration.  The freezing climate delays decomposition of the corpses and the families keep them at home for several days.

The pilgrim loves the country and the people, but concludes rather negatively: “Despite all the liveliness and gaiety, I felt a little disappointed.  In their amusements, the inhabitants of this western coast have retained hardly anything of their own cultural heritage, nothing that really belongs to them.”  A lot of able-bodied, but resentful, Greenlanders “simply live on allowances from the Danish government.”

He planned to stay for a second winter, and “had adapted so well to Greenland that I believed nothing could stop me spending the rest of my days there.”  But he felt he had to return to Europe, write his story in French and “help the youth of Africa open their minds to the outside world.”  He is given the precious totems of a polar bear’s tooth and claw, and leaves Greenland with a heavy heart.  But he remains impressed by the kindness of the people and the spectacular scenery.  He watches the dynamic patterns of radiant light in the aurora borealis, and the first thick snowflakes in September that look as if “all the white birds in the world were shedding their feathers.”

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Jeffrey Meyers published Forty-Three Ways to Look at Hemingway in November 2025.  The Biographer’s Quest will be out in April 2026.