Now, this IS a book review:

one that gives you a terrible, insurmountable urge to go buy the book :-)
It's about the translated edition of an original French oeuvre, and indeed it must be the strangest travel book ever written.
I looked for it in a French search engine (not google.anything, Dieu merci) and I got three-meagre-hits-three, plus 'Ouvrage epuisé'
:-( snif
(i've underlined some of my fave pieces of info)





An African in Greenland

Our dinner guest a few weeks ago got to talking about the thing we always get to talking about with dinner guests, The State of The Culture. He must have been drinking from the well of Evolutionary Psychology, because that is the angle he came at it from. There are (he claimed) tropical cultures and arctic cultures, with intermediate gradations. Human sexual bonding in pure-tropical cultures is of the "grazing" variety: a man hooks up with a woman, impregnates her, then wanders off and repeats the performance with another woman. The women don?t mind the looseness of their attachments, because in tropical circumstances food is easy to get, and a woman can raise children without much dependence on men. There are low levels of sexual jealousy, and "low-investment" parenting on the part of males. These males are, as the Evol-Psych jargon goes, "cads" rather than "dads." In pure arctic cultures, by contrast, food can only be got by sustained arduous exertions. The species can only survive in an arctic climate by sticking doggedly together in tight kinship groups, practicing strict monogamy and high-investment parenting.

We in the modern West (our dinner guest argued on) are mostly people with arctic genes trying to adjust to a tropical culture. Not that our climate has changed in a tropical direction, but we have simulated a tropical climate by inventing equality of opportunity and the welfare state, in which environment?just as in pre-modern Micronesia or equatorial Africa - women don't really need to have men around in order to raise kids. Instead of food dropping from the trees, it drops from all those well-paid jobs that women now have equal access to - or if all else fails, from the welfare office. All our current social problems flow from this mismatch between our genetic endowment and the environment we have created.

The main effect this discourse had on me, in fact, was to remind me of a book I heard about some years ago and had always intended to read.

The book is titled An African in Greenland. Written about twenty-five years ago, it is the first-person account of a journey undertaken by the author, Tété-Michel Kpomassie, from his home village in West Africa to Upernavik in northern Greenland. Kpomassie's part of Africa is francophone - nowadays the nation of Togo - so the book was written first in French, then translated into English by James Kirkup in 1983. (And that 1983 English edition comes with a very silly preface, packed with "post-colonialist" cant, by some vaporing French academic. This is not representative of the book. If you get this, you should rip out the stupid preface and stomp on it.) The latest edition of Kirkup's translation, still widely available, was published by The New York Review of Books in 2001. The author seems to have been born around 1941; the period covered by the book is roughly 1957 - 1968.

Kpomassie was raised in one of the deeply conservative tribal societies bordering the Gulf of Guinea. (His tribe, he tells us, was the Watyi.) In the late 1950s, when the story begins, these people were well acquainted with the modern world, but had embraced only its utilitarian aspects. Kpomassie's father, for example, worked as an electrician, but had five wives. The family scorned Christianity, preferring the ancient animism of their region. After Kpomassie had an unpleasant encounter with a snake, his family elders decided that he was destined to become a priest in a local snake cult. This involved living in the deep jungle among pythons. Kpomassie was not keen on the idea. At just this time, at a bookstore in the nearest city, he happened to see Dr. Robert Gessain's book The Eskimos from Greenland to Alaska. Kpomassie was seized with the idea that he should go and live among these folk. By a sustained effort of will, and through many difficulties - it took him six years just to work his way to Europe, two more to get to Greenland - he eventually did so.

With that facility for languages that tribal peoples often have, he learned French, German, Danish (Greenland was a Danish colony at the time), and Eskimo. He seems to have been almost entirely self-educated, keeping up correspondence courses while working his way along the West African coast.

But what about The State of The Culture? Here you surely have what must be the definitive test of my dinner guest's thesis about arctic versus tropical genetic endowments. Well, on the evidence of Kpomassie's book, the thesis is total nonsense. In the matter of sexual morality, for example, the Watyi were not a particularly prudish people, but Kpomassie was shocked by the casual promiscuity of Greenland:

Gerhart and I went to visit Lydia. [These people with Danish names are all Eskimos, by the way.] - Assavakit! - (I love you) she cried when she greeted me. Deeply moved, I stroked her cheek. As we were leaving, she told me: - Come back with Adam this evening at seven.? - That evening we refused all other invitations. When we got to Lydia's room a little earlier than expected, we saw Karl, Adam's brother, lying naked in the bed beside Lydia! They were drinking beer and laughing. Seeing them lying there side by side, I couldn't help feeling upset. To my astonishment, she didn't understand why I was angry. In Greenland, jealousy is frowned upon. Greenland morality was beginning to disgust me.

These casual morals might have had nothing to do with traditional Eskimo culture. All these Eskimos were Danish citizens, and enjoyed the benefits of a typically generous Scandinavian welfare state. Nobody in southern Greenland seemed to do much work, and practically nobody was sober after mid-morning.

Apart from Eric - and one or two others who often left the village on fishing expeditions, none of the people I met seemed to have any definite job. Gerhart trailed me around with him day and night and seemed to do nothing. [Karl] gave me the impression of being a parasite living off his brothers. As for Hans, who supposedly worked at the naval dockyard, not once since my arrival had he gone to work. Yet Paulina was always offering coffee and drinks to visitors. How did she get the money? Well, let's face it: a lot of able-bodied Greenlanders simply live on allowances from the Danish government.
Why is this? Children are sent to school but are not taught anything about their traditional activities. Even worse, their way of life is disparaged to their faces. When they grow up, they can't even paddle a kayak. That's how things are for the Greenlanders on the southern coast. - But are there still places with seal hunters and huskies, sledges and kayaks? - I asked. - Avannamût! - (You must go further north!)

There he does indeed find the old way of life still in some kind of existence, and goes hunting for whale, seal, and blue shark, in the traditional style, passing comments on the differences between whale hunting in the arctic and lion hunting on the African plains - Kpomassie must surely be the only person that has ever been qualified to make such comparisons. He finds the sexual morals of the north no stricter than those of the south, though. At the northernmost of his residences, a traditional Eskimo turf house, he slept together with all his host's family in a single bed, for warmth. The family included a girl of twenty who was eight months pregnant. She claimed not to know who the father was, but village gossip alleged it was her own father.
Kpomassie speaks plainly about the dirt and squalor of Eskimo life, and leaves one with the definite impression that a high level of tolerance for the disgusting is essential for anyone who wishes to dwell among these people.

Snow melted on the slopes, the street became a river of mud, and innumerable streams riddled the ash-grey earth and brought to light piles of old bottles and cans, dog shit, household waste, and rotten potatoes. All the garbage which cold and snow had preserved - now swollen with melted water, rotting fast and buzzing with clouds of flies - came out to haunt us like a bad conscience. Outside the doors and under the foundations, the houses were repulsively filthy. A sickening stench hung everywhere. The dogs, some of them now moulting, slunk squalidly round the village.

For all the disgust, though, Kpomassie falls deeply in love with the Eskimos and their land, thereby accomplishing what must surely be the most astounding act of cultural assimilation in all of human history.

More than once, the previous winter, I had driven a dog-sled team alone, perched on my load of frozen fish, often through starry nights swept by the aurora borealis. In those moments of intense cold, with my eyes focused on the track beaten smooth by sleds and my body full of a sense of sweet well-being, I had never missed my native Africa, for the poetry of movement on the ice froze up the muggy heat of my native tropics. I had adapted so well to Greenland that I believed nothing could stop me spending the rest of my days there.

Though it tends to explode my dinner guest's glib little thesis, Kpomassie's book speaks to The State of The Culture nonetheless. Reading it, I found myself thinking of my own background, in a way I never quite had before. Born a few years after Kpomassie and raised in an English country town, I am one of the last generation of Westerners to have experienced a culture with strong traditional values. The things I was taught as a child were much closer to the things my great-grandparents were taught than they are to anything an English child born twenty years after me would have learned.

My upbringing wasn't as tradition-bound as Kpomassie's, but by the time I reached any kind of social awareness I knew that a question addressed to an adult and beginning with the words "Why should I have to ?" - was most likely to be met with a glance of angry puzzlement and the response: "Because that's the way it's done!"

And the break-up of the whole thing was of course my generation's fault. When we reached the age at which we knew everything, at which our minds had penetrated all the way through the deepest mysteries of the universe - which is to say, round about age sixteen - we came to find all that tradition and custom unbearably irksome. We ostentatiously remained seated during the post-movie National Anthem, to much disgust, and sometimes abuse, from older members of the audience.

In his book, Kpomassie draws a melancholy picture of a deserted Eskimo village. It had dawned on the inhabitants one day that they could swap their traditional, very arduous, hunting lifestyle for the much easier fishing-and-welfare ways of the nearby town, so they all decamped.

You could argue that even this is for the best. The traditional Eskimo life was awfully hard, especially on the old. (The ice floe business you have heard about is not quite true, but something similar went on. Kpomassie is very eloquent about the reverence given to old people in his African tribe, as against the "useless mouths" attitude that seems to have prevailed among the Eskimos.)

I doubt things are going much better with the traditional West African society Kpomassie was raised in. My guess is that it has been smashed to pieces by combined assaults from the international-aid bureaucracies, the rapacity of French industrialists and politicians, and misrule by Sorbonne-educated African intellectuals, steeped - like all modern intellectuals - in a deep contempt and loathing for ordinary people, for their traditions and customs and folkways, their beliefs and attitudes, their tastes and preferences, their religion and ethnic loyalties.

What happened to the Eskimos and the Watyi has also happened to us in some degree. My kids don't play the street games we used to play because they are too busy on the computer.

What's to reverence? We seem to have actually lost some conceptual power, the power to see past individual persons to the institutions they represent. Perhaps this is the final triumph of individualism.

Still, when we escaped from all that, we at least understood that we had lost something, and this is a thing that the following generations do not know. "Why should I have to ?" - No reason, really, none that stands up to rigorous logical scrutiny. So don't, if you don't feel like it. Those who know about and care about nothing at all that is old, traditional or customary are adrift and aimless in a blank, nihilistic, hedonistic world, in which nothing matters much because everything is permitted. How I pity them!

Is modern Western culture really anything more than just a better furnished version of the booze-sodden, AIDS-addled, traditionless, pointless existence of the modern Greenlanders? I don't know, I just wonder. I am sure that Tété-Michel Kpomassie, wherever he is, wonders the same thing. So, probably, do a few Eskimos. What a wonderful book, to make a person think so much!

[it is possible to Look Inside the Book in Amazon]