When Tete-Michel Kpomassie was a teenager he found a book in a store in Togo where he was born and raised about Greenland. He fell in love and spent the next ten years working his way from his homeland across Europe to the furthest reaches of the Artic Circle where he lived with Eskimos, fishing, dog sledding, and hunting for seals. His book “An African in Greenland” was published in 1981 and details his adventures eating raw whale blubber and trying to understand the cheery (but at times alarming) cultural practices of the Inuits. It’s been interesting to read Kpomassie’s story—a black man in a white world in every sense of the term—at the moment I’ve been immersed in the inverse experience of being a Mzungu (white) among Tanzanians. Of course, my trip doesn’t have the superlative qualities of Kpomassie’s, but the experience of foreignness and exposure to the new and unknown seems essentially similar...

Here is Kpomassie’s description of seeing the aurora borealis for the first time:

“On the night of the day the first snow fell I was frightened by a bizarre phenomenon. I was walking home alone and the night was still. Suddenly looking up, I saw long white streaks whirling in the wind above my head. It was like the radiance of some invisible hearth, from which dazzling light rays shot out, streamed into space, and spread to form a great deep-folded phosphorescent curtain which moved and shimmered, turning rapidly from white to yellow, from pink to red. The curtain suddenly rose, then fell again further on. The wind shook it gently like an immense transparent drapery carried by the breeze and drifting on thin air. Its movements were now regular as an ocean swell, now hurried, jerky, leaping and tumbling like a kite. There were continual changes in the intensity, the motion, the iridescent play of colors and the ripplings of this strange, gigantic veil that floated through the night sky. I stood watching it for ten minutes, stunned and fascinated.”