Having raised the issue of the geographical diversity of African travel literature in the previous chapter, in the following pages I will develop it further by looking at Tété-Michel Kpomassie's L'Africain de Grœnland. This intriguing account of a journey to the Arctic was published in Paris in 1981 but recounts a journey that begins late in 1958 on the eve of African independence, when, at the age of 16, Kpomassie takes a ‘taxi-brousse’ from his home in Togo to his aunt's house in the then Ivory Coast capital, Abidjan. Here he takes up the first of many posts that will fund his ambition to travel beyond the African continent. Eight years later, after slow but eventful progress through various African and European countries, the author finally arrives for a sixteen-month stay in the Danish colony of Greenland.

Certainly, by reversing the story of European colonial travel to Africa and journeying ‘back’ to the European ‘centre’, Tété-Michel Kpomassie's L'Africain du Grœnland retains a key element of the predominant travel paradigm studied here. From the text's title, however, it is clear that Kpomassie's account of his journey is somewhat at odds with what we have come to expect. Most notably, even if Kpomassie travels through the colonial centre, it is not his final destination.