BBC World Service, and now, witness history. Today, Alex Lust is telling the story of

Tate Michelle Pumassi, dubbed the Arctic African. He journeyed from Togo and West Africa to

live in the Arctic in the 1960s and wrote a book, which became a literary sensation.

I started a journey of discovery, only to find that I was being discovered. I was one of them.

I became a kind of the African Eskimo.

But the story of Tate Michelle Pumassi began thousands of miles from the Arctic on the West African coast.

He was born in a village in Togo in 1941. His father had eight wives, and he was one of 26 children.

I grew up as an ordinary African boy. We designated to live my African life in my African village and become either a good farmer or a hunter.

Like other kids, he used to climb the towering coconut trees to harvest the nuts. Then one day, while up a tree, something happened that would start his odyssey.

One morning, I was on top of the tree, and suddenly, there was a snake and looking at me and coming towards me, I fell down from the tree, and I lost conscious.

Tate Michelle was hurt and developed a fever, but his father, who held traditional animist beliefs, believed that for a full recovery, he needed to visit a traditional healer, a priestess of the snake cult.

He took me to the sacred forest. The priestess asked my father, if after my convulsions, he could bring money back so that I become a priest of the snake worshippers.

And my father told her, yes, but my father didn't ask me anything.

Tate did not like this plan at all. With just weeks before he was due to join the snake cult, he found a book in a local missionary book shop that would change his life.

I wanted it to escape, and I saw a book entitled, Les Esquimos, du Grohlland, Alaska. The picture on the cover, a man dressed in animal skins with a harp on a hunter.

And I learnt that it is so cold in Briland that there are no snakes. Where is that paradise?

So I ran away, I was 16 and a half. I was obsessed with Esquimos. People said, yeah, you are completely mad.

It took me eight years to get to Griland.

Tate Michel worked his way across West Africa and Europe until in 1965 he had saved enough money for a ticket on a cargo ship from Denmark to Greenland, then a Danish colony.

The ship docked in southern Greenland and Tate Michel approached the crowd waiting on the key.

I was the first black man. They had everything.

As soon as they saw me, all talking stopped. And the children were so afraid. Some started whipping and they said,

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