Book Description

A chance encounter with a picture book about Greenland inspires the young Tete-Michel Kpomassie to embark on a life-changing journey that would last ten years. Leaving his native Togo, he travels to the Ivory Coast, Senegal, Mauritania, Paris, and Copenhagen before reaching his ultimate destination. The author's distinctly African voice and perspective create a narrative that is refreshingly free of Western assumptions and prejudices. Readers witness innumerable culture clashes between the African and Inuit cultures, as well as occasional surprising similarities. A New York Times Notable Book. ... Read more

Reviews (5)

From Togo to Thule (almost)--a fine book by a good writer
When author Kpomassie was a teenager in his native Togo in the '50s, he nearly died in a fall, and was pledged by his father to become a priest of the python cult that cured him. While looking for a way around this future, he happened upon a book about Greenland and became obsessed with the idea of moving there and becoming a hunter. Over the course of several years, Kpomassie worked his way across West Africa and Europe before arriving in Greenland in the early '60s. He was possibly the first African to visit Greenland, and was the first black person most of the Greenlanders had ever seen. He became a minor celebrity ("I've heard about you on the radio since you arrived in the south"), as the locals, particularly children and young women, swarmed around the exotic stranger. As he made his way up the coast of west Greenland, he stopped in several towns, where he was invariably taken into someone's home as a guest and treated to fine delicacies like seal blubber and mattak (beluga whale skin).

Kpomassie is an excellent observer, and this book is as good an introduction to Greenlandic culture as Gretel Ehrlich's "This Cold Heaven". Kpomassie is a much more straightforward writer than Ehrlich, and this book therefore makes an easier read. The reader gets to learn about two exotic cultures: Kpomassie's tales of his upbringing in the Mina tribe of Togo is as interesting as his travels in Greenland.

(1=poor 2=mediocre 3=pretty good 4=very good 5=phenomenal)

wow!
Kpomassie refreshingly reveals without a trace of romanticisme the widly different world of the Inuits. From espisodes of intense companionship to loneliness, exhalation and revultion, our African traveler describes a frigid landscape populated with a very colorful culture and personalities. Extreemly engaging Tbetbe-Michel Kpomassie's courageous personality charms us and the world he describes.

An African in Greenland
Excellent book about how a person can be self sufficient in achieving their wildest dreams. A word of caution, this book is not for the squeamish. Some of the scenes described in the book may offend a reader not familiar with the customs of the Far North. However, I thought that the book gave me an excellent fresh look at how people live around the world.

The fascinating story of a true 20th century adventure
Modern times mean modern means. Our contemporary adventurers always tote an amazing array of technology with them, or they rely on the backup of millions of dollars worth of equipment. Heading off to the stars eventually will involve the work of thousands of people. We always knew where the first balloonists around the world were, even their altitude. The Vikings never had that advantage, nor did the explorers of the Amazon nor the Micronesians as they sailed across the vast Pacific. Here is a story of a real, one-man adventure that started in the 1960s. A teenager in Togo, West Africa, Kpomassie grew up in an African village family. After a close encounter with a python, he was destined to become a priest in the traditional religion. His destiny was changed, though, the day he found a book on Greenland in a Christian bookshop. Utterly fascinated, he determined to travel to the far north to live with the Eskimos himself. This volume is the wonderful story of how he did it. It took eight years of effort to work his way across Africa to France, then ultimately, to Denmark from where he embarked on a ship to Greenland. Most of the book tells of how he lived, worked, hunted, found romance, ate and drank with the denizens of the frozen north, all told with an African perspective. "...the way we were stuffing ourselves with food and swapping stories reminded me so much of Africa..." (p.118) If "white man looks at the natives and pities them" is not your bag, then this is the perfect antidote. Kpomassie blends in so well, he thinks of staying there for the rest of his life, even learns to eat raw whale meat that splintered like ice in his mouth. You will never find another book like this. Buy it !

An awesome cross-cultural adventure
Thought provoking, inciteful and inspirational this incredible tale of fullfilling a life long dream will have you wondering why you haven't done something exciting with your life. ... Read more

Amazon.com

"The future here could be sadder than the present," writes Robert Kaplan in a chapter about the African nation of Sierra Leone. From Kaplan's perspective, the same could be said of virtually the entire Third World, which he spends the bulk of this book visiting and describing. Kaplan, an acclaimed foreign correspondent and author of Balkan Ghosts, is congenitally pessimistic about the developmental prospects of West Africa, the Nile Valley, and much of Asia. This traveler's tale offers dire warnings about overpopulation, environmental degradation, and social chaos. We should all hope that Kaplan's forecast is wrong, but we ignore him at our peril. ... Read more

Reviews (49)

gloriously and sublimely depressing
I was introduced to Robert Kaplan's work through his articles for Atlantic Monthly. His analysis of the world stage is so insightful and realistic it makes most of the other things I've read in the area seem like Fairy Tales and Demagoguery. In a previous book he successfully foretold the crisis in the Balkans, in this book he brings his pen and his observational acumen to the edge of civilization.

This book is essentially a travel journal; Mr. Kaplan joins up with backpackers, gets hassled at borders, gets overcharged for train tickets. Fortunately for the reader, Mr. Kaplan's travels have the singular, though somewhat opaque purpose of divining the state of the societies in which he travels. The things observed, though interesting in their own right, are weaved by Mr. Kaplan into a roughly hewn picture of the cultures in which he travels. Things as simple as the look in the eye of a street urchin or the way in which a woman covers her head contribute to this picture in invaluable ways.

Kaplan's assessments are, on the whole, fairly pessimistic and he is skeptical about the efficacy of foreign assistance. One of Kaplan's overarching themes is that many of the dynamics that are at work in these places are nearly impossible to disarm from the outside, and that attempts to do so often cause more harm than good.

There is a tinge of fatalism in the accounts of many regions, West Africa, for one. But Kaplan does leave his readers with a mere series of plaintive elegies. His reification of the mechanics of chaotic polity offer many constructive lessons on how to offer modest assistance, and more important, how to avoid exacerbating these situations through well-intentioned meddling.

My understanding of the volatile regions of our world was greatly improved by this book. For that reason alone, I recommend it to all readers.

A very worthy effort, but...
Don't buy this book thinking it's merely a travelogue of some of the world's poorer and lesser-known nations. (In fact, if that's all you're looking for, then I highly recommend Pico Iyer's Falling off the Map instead.) No, it's a cleverly disguised sociopolitical analysis, but unlike most such works, it's refreshing in that Kaplan freely admits his observations are subjective and possibly wrong. But that's exactly the problem. Despite physically travelling to all these destinations, Kaplan seems to spend precious little time actually TALKING with real citizenry in most places. Instead he whisks from Western hotels in the capital to meetings with various pols and officials before scuttling off to the next country, sometimes just days later. And therein lies the failure of an otherwise worthy effort from an outstanding writer: the superficiality of most of his experiences in these places. Give him a few days in a country, coupled with a bit of background reading and perhaps a few conversations with experts at home, and Kaplan feels justified in making sweeping generalizations about where these nations have been, and where they are going. Had Kaplan just stopped country-hopping and stayed in one region for a longer time, I think his conclusions would have been much improved. A side note: having travelled to a number of these countries (as one of the "backpackers" that Kaplan scornfully derides throughout the book), his constant dramatizing of the mundane grows tedious after a while...I think the only person surprised that the third world can be dirty, smelly, and unpredictable is Kaplan himself.

a journalistic fraud
I bought this book for its rave reviews and thought I would learn something from it. When reading his chapters about Iran, I was quite disappointed to see that Kaplan does little more than to be taken around by his handlers to those they wished him to see and talk to. Furthermore, he does even less than a newcomer to the field would do; he does not even provide context or background. One of his primary interview subject is Mohsen Rafighdoost who stole so much that even his own backers could not tolerate him. Kaplan is also historically inaccurate and downright deceptive. He characterizes the Zoroastrian religion as pagan. He either does not know or he does this maliciously. This oldest monotheistic religion has been studied and discussed about so much that ignorance would not be a good enough excuse for its mischaracterization. Last, but not least, Kaplan borrows long paragraphs and essays from other authors about Iran where he thinks his stereotyping of the people needs backing. He does that without context and is patently fraudulent. For one, I have read "the garden of the brave in war" and where he borrows from that book, is arguably opposite to the intent of the author.
If this had been a "pay for purpose" work I would understand its content, but as a proposed "independent work of authorship" I believe it is no more than a waste of time and money.

Uncovering the new threats of the 21st century
Robert Kaplan sought to achieve a rather ambitious aim when he set out to research and write this book; he wanted to find a new paradigm to understand the early decades of the 21st century. Kaplan noted that some experts focused on the effects of overpopulation and environmental degradation as the dominant forces (particularly in the developing world), while others spoke of a "new anarchy" (such as former UN secretary-general Perez de Cuellar, he and others noting that of the eighty wars between 1945 and 1995, forty-six were either civil wars or guerilla insurgencies). In 1993, forty-two countries were involved in major conflicts and thirty-seven others were suffering some lesser form of political violence (sixty-five of these seventy-nine nations were in the developing world). Kaplan journeyed through sub-Saharan West Africa from Guinea to Togo and through Egypt, Turkey, Iran, former Soviet Central Asia, Pakistan, India, Thailand, Laos, and Cambodia in his research for the book.

He found a predictably bleak situation in Africa. While 13 percent of the human race lives in Africa, they contribute only 1.2 percent of the world's gross domestic product. Crime - particularly violent crime - is soaring in much of Africa; for a time the United States suspended direct flights from the U.S. to Lagos, Nigeria due to the rampant violent crime at the terminal and nearby, the first time any such embargo had occurred for non-political and non-terrorist reasons. Soaring malaria in Africa is intensifying the spread of AIDS (as malaria can result in anemia, which requires blood transfusions), just as AIDS and tuberculosis are helping each other's spread.

As bad as the economy, crime, and disease in Africa are though, Kaplan believes the real problem in sub-Saharan Africa is too-rapid urbanization, a problem he comes to again and again in the book. Festering "bush-slums" that appear on few maps border many African cities, where relatively prosperous cities end up being "slum-magnets for an emptying countryside." He visited several such slums in Ivory Coast and elsewhere in West Africa, many packed with migrants from Mali, Niger, and elsewhere (50% of the population of the Ivory Coast is now non-Ivorian). The native forest culture of Africa, however primitive, was being destroyed by soaring birthrates, alcohol, cheap guns, and extremely dense concentrations of humanity in slums that lacked any stabilizing and unifying government or culture. Though he does not believe this to be the only factor in the bloody conflicts in Liberia and elsewhere, he does believe it to be a dominant one.

Though not leading to the level of social breakdown as seen in Africa, rapidly growing cities - packed with peasants drawn in from the countryside - was a dominant feature in other nations he found as well. China, while touted at the time of writing as having a 14 per cent growth rate, really meant that coastal China was growing; this growth did not apply to inland China (and also could be said to favor the cities and not the countryside), leading to a mass migration from the countryside. Migration to shantytowns in Pakistan is tremendous, owing in large part to a skyrocketing population rate (only 9 percent of Pakistani women use contraceptives and the population of Pakistan is close to doubling every twenty years), a situation leading to empty villages and a poorly urbanized peasantry that cities are unable to cope with.

Kaplan found similar problems in Egypt, where urban poverty and newly urbanized peasants, threatened with the loss of traditions, the government unable to help them, with basic services like water and electricity breaking down, having found something to turn to; Islam. Islam is thriving in a time of unregulated urbanization and internal and external refugee migrations. With increasingly militant Islamic Egyptians turning against Christian Arabs (both Coptic Christians, who like the Lebanese Kaplan met in West Africa and the Korean grocers of South Los Angeles, formed a "middlemen minority" in Egypt, as well as the Christian leaders like UN secretary-general Boutros-Ghali who failed to aid Bosnian Muslims) and turning to the Ikhwan el Muslimin (Muslim Brotherhood) for social services instead of an increasingly overburdened state, Kaplan sees scarcity and woes of the urbanized peasantry of the shantytowns as the driving force in many ways in Egypt.

The growing marriage of Islam and urbanized peasantry was not unique to Egypt. To a somewhat lesser extent Kaplan found a similar process on-going in Turkey, as the Turkish migrants to the gecekondus (literally "built in the night;" shanty-town houses) on the fringes of Istanbul found more aid from the Islamic Welfare Party in the form of water, coal, and food than from the Turkish government itself. In some areas of western China such as Kashgar, overcrowding, unemployment, and the lack of any real middle class was leading to a Muslim resurgence there among non-ethnic Chinese.

So what did Kaplan learn from his travels? He was quite frustrated, and found that the more he traveled the less he felt he knew. Kaplan did grow disgusted with the idea of political "science," paraphrasing Tolstoy in _Anna Karenina_ in writing that while successful cultures are in many ways alike, unsuccessful ones fail each in their own way. He did come to the conclusion that nation-states at least in West Africa, the Near East, and Central Asia were weakening. In some cases organizations and entities outside or beyond the state - such as the various Islamic groups in Egypt and Turkey - were starting to fill in the vacuum, while in other, failed states such as Sierra Leone, nothing was taking its place. Borders in some regions, the legacy of long-gone European imperial powers, were becoming less and less important. Laos and Cambodia were in some sense creations of the French, areas that might have long been swallowed by the Chinese, Vietnamese, and Thai and were now being divided up economically if not politically by these countries. I think his firmest conclusion though was that poorly and newly urbanized rural poor flocking to the cities represented the greatest challenge.

A Provocative Travelogue
Kaplan presents more than a travelogue of some of the most inaccessible places in the world, he also makes a compelling case about why these forgotten pockets need to be of more than passing concern to citizens of developed countries. While the author's characterization of these "frontiers of anarchy" is provocative, his arguments cannot be ignored.

This book's first third, which focuses on West Africa, can be profitably read alongside an in-depth study like LIBERIA: PORTRAIT OF A FAILED STATE by John Peter Pham, published by Reed Press, which gives a detailed analysis of the strategic importance that Kaplan ascribes to regional conflicts. ... Read more

Book Description

Togo is a small West African country nestled between Benin and Ghana, extending from its narrow coastline 320 miles inland to Burkina Faso. Although the country's phosphate production has given it a modicum of economic stability, Togo remains politically unstable. The third edition of the "Historical Dictionary of Togo" expands and updates the 1987 edition and includes events occurring after the previous edition. Written by one of the foremost experts on African politics, this indispensable reference source provides concise dictionary entries covering the people, places, events, political and economic institutions, history and culture of this fascinating country. It contains a comprehensive, multilingual bibliography divided according to subject; tables with important economic and demographic data; a list of abbreviations; an updated chronology of recent political events; and three maps covering transport and communications, administrative divisions and ethnic divisions. Reviews of the Previous Edition: "There is much valuable information in this work that would not be retrieved easily elsewhere...highly recommended..." --ARBA "...a worthwhile contribution...the bibliography succeeds admirably in drawing these sources together." --AFRICA ... Read more

Reviews (1)

Don't buy this
I have studied the book about admiral Yonai. So what I tell here is only about that. But for me it is enough. If you take his book about Yamamoto: "Yamamoto: the man who planned Pearl Harbor" (New York 1990) you will find that what Yamamoto did in the one book about becoming (vice-)minister of Naval Affairs, in the other Yonai did. Most facts about Yonai in "Tree Military Leaders" are wrong. And a lot about Yamamoto too! That was enough for me to lay down the book and keep it that way. ... Read more

Book Description

Togo has recently come to the attention to global strategic planners.This report puts these executives on the fast track.Ten chapters provide: an overview of how to strategically access this important market, a discussion on economic fundamentals, marketing & distribution options, export and direct investment options, and full risk assessments (political, cultural, legal, human resources).Ample statistical benchmarks and comparative graphs are given. ... Read more

Book Description

A survey of the history of the western slave coast of Africa, a name derived from the principal aspect of early relations between Europe and Africa. This history is traced from the kings of Abomey in the mid-seventeenth century through the three different European administrations, to the establishment of the Fon and Yoruba Protectorates in the late nineteenth- century. ... Read more