John Derbyshire describes the strangest travel book ever written, An African in Greenland:
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.It is, as it sounds, the strangest travel book ever written.
He finds the Eskimos boozin’ it up and sleepin’ around — and not living the traditional Eskimo lifestyle:
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.
Derbyshire notes that he’s “one of the last generation of Westerners to have experienced a culture with strong traditional values”:
The things I was taught as a child — the hymns and songs and poems, the Latin and geometry and grammar, the street games and rhymes and customs, respect for the Crown, the Church, the Nation, the School, my elders — 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.
This example really stood out:
In movie theaters in England in the 1950s, the National Anthem was always played at the end of the movie. Everybody stood up and stayed at attention out of respect to the Monarch until the anthem was over.
Things have changed.