Tété-Michel Kpomassie

After an eight-year journey in which he enrolled in correspondence courses and worked as a newspaper translator, Tété-Michel Kpomassie arrived in Greenland by boat from Copenhagen. When the nearly six-foot-tall Togolese stepped ashore, the locals “all talking stopped. So intense was the silence, you could have heard a gnat in flight.” Two days later his arrival was announced by the national radio station. Kpomassie eventually settled in France, where in 1981 he published his memoir An African in Greenland, which was awarded the Prix Littéraire Francophone International.