Back in March 2012, when I posted about my Togolese pick for my year of reading the world, I said that Tété-Michel Kpomassie was the writer I would most like to meet. Little did I know then that, almost exactly a decade later, I would be speaking to him.
Yesterday, however, I got to realise my dream (virtually at least) and spent 40 minutes talking to the intrepid explorer, whose extraordinary journey across the world to live with the Inuit in the 1960s has long been an inspiration for me.
The call came about after I heard the wonderful news that Kpomassie’s groundbreaking memoir, An African in Greenland, translated by James Kirkup, was being reissued as a Penguin Modern Classic, with a new afterword, translated by Ros Schwartz. When Penguin contacted me about it, I seized the opportunity to ask to speak with the great man, who is now 80 and lives in France.
It turned out to be one of the most joyful, thrilling and thought-provoking conversations of my life. I was humbled to hear Kpomassie say that he saw parallels between our quests because they both came out of a desire to push beyond received notions and meet the world on our own terms. And my delight knew no bounds when, holding up the beautiful new English-language edition of his book, I saw Kpomassie raise a copy of my novel, Beside Myself, in reply.
We covered many things. I asked Kpomassie how he maintained so much energy and enthusiasm after living with the aftermath of his life-defining journey for so many decades. ‘It’s easy,’ he told me. ‘I am still the same person.’
He went on to explain that, for him, the extraordinary adventure he began as a teenager has always had the quality of a mission – a calling entrusted to him by the surprising collision of many factors (the appearance of the python that gave him his fear of snakes; the baffling presence of a book about Greenland in a shop in rural Togo; the fact that his six years of education gave him just enough French to understand the text and conceive his ambition to run away to this treeless, snake-free land).
A big part of this mission involves opening up the minds of young Africans to the wider world. ‘I think Africans should learn many languages and travel,’ he told me. But he is clear that this must work both ways. There should be greater prominence for and celebration of African culture internationally.
For Kpomassie, language is central to this. ‘We have more than 100 languages in Togo, yet if a young boy can’t speak French perfectly, he cannot succeed. That’s ridiculous,’ he told me, going on to say that it was similarly outrageous that African nations are among the few that don’t speak their own languages when they go to international conventions such as those at the UN.
He would like to see a Pan-African language chosen as the continent’s lingua franca – whether Swahili, Wolof or another widely spoken tongue. This, he says, would play a powerful role in evening up international relations and cultural exchange: people around the world would learn it in much the same way as many European languages are studied, thereby opening up opportunities for African linguists and translators.
The point, he stressed, was to be respectful and evenhanded. ‘No culture is better than another.’
Kpomassie has seen firsthand the damage favouring one culture over another can do. He still remembers the outrage and confusion the European missionaries caused when they tried to convince his father to abandon seven of his eight wives and marry one in a Christian ceremony, an action that would have spelled disaster for many of his brothers and sisters, and could have started a feud with neighbouring villages.
Yet it wasn’t until he reached Greenland that the extent of the wrongs done by colonial evangelism became clear to Kpomassie. ‘They changed the words [of the Lord’s Prayer] to “Give us this day our daily seal”,’ he told me. ‘But no-one gives you a seal at minus 40 degrees. You have to work really hard for it. I realised then that “Give us this day our daily bread” was a lie used to control us.’
Different though they were in so many ways, Kpomassie found parallels between the animism of the Inuit and the traditional beliefs of his community. There was a respect for nature and a sense of oneness with the environment that he found lacking in many European settlers, who made handbags out of the pythons that were sacred to locals in Togo.
This is one of the reasons that, as he writes in the afterword of the new edition of Michel the Giant: An African in Greenland, on some level, he never really left Greenland. And it is why he will move back there later this year. After a lecture tour, he plans to live out his days reading and writing in the country that won his heart more than 50 years ago. ‘This time,’ he says, ‘I will not return.’