BREAKING THE ICE

In 1965, Tété-Michel Kpomassie left his village in Togo for a new life in Greenland. Now, at 80, he’s planning to retire to his ‘spiritual home’

- Michael Segalov

THE WARM LIVING ROOM OF TÉTÉMICHEL KPOMASSIE’S OTHERWISE NEAT PARISIAN HOME has a coffee table in the middle of it piled high with keepsakes – a mountain of black-and-white pictures, letters and handwritten diaries. It’s an archive of one remarkable man’s intrepidly adventurous and unconventional life to date. Balanced on top of the overloaded files and folders sits a tattered book, its pages faded. On its cover is a portrait of an Inuit in a sealskin jacket, standing next to an icy shore. The title reads Les Esquimaux du Groenland à l’Alaska (The Eskimos from Greenland to Alaska). It’s a 1947 work of nonfiction written by French anthropologist Robert Gessain.

Decades may have passed since the day Kpomassie first set his teenage eyes upon this image in his native Togo, but the 80-year-old remembers the precise moment as if it had happened just minutes before. How could he not? What he found inside has, since that day, consumed him entirely, shaping every chapter of his own story. He ran away from home at 16 to embark on an epic cross-continental mission that delivered him to Greenland, the world’s northernmost country. He was the first African man to set foot there. The adventure resulted in a travelogue, return visits and countless speaking invitations, and, more recently, a rather acrimonious divorce. Now, his very own sealskin jacket hangs by the door to his home in pride of place.

Quite what an academic study of Inuit peoples was doing on the shelves of a small Christian missionary bookshop in 1950s Lomé remains a mystery. Kpomassie stumbled across it while recovering from a tree-top run-in with a snake. The only explanation he can think of, after years of contemplation, is that finding it was his destiny – an undeniable consequence of some predetermined fate.