People & Culture

Togo runs north from the Gulf of Guinea to the edge of the Sahel in a corridor barely wide enough to hold a single glance, stretching close to 580 kilometres from coast to northern border while narrowing in places to under 160 kilometres, with a coastline of only about 56 kilometres of sand. A traveller can cross the whole country in a day's drive and pass through savanna, forested hills and dense green interior on the way. The Togo Mountains, an extension of the same chain that becomes the Atakora in Benin, run diagonally through the centre from southwest to northeast, rising to their highest point at Mount Agou near Kpalime before the land flattens into the sandstone plateaus and dry Sudan savanna of the north. Few countries compress so much ecological and cultural range into so narrow a strip of land. That compression shows in how deep the human history runs before any European saw the coast. Oral tradition places the founding of Tado, near the modern border with Benin, at around the year 1000, and identifies it as the common cradle of the Aja, Ewe and Fon peoples who would later spread across three countries. From Tado, internal power struggles pushed groups outward in waves, one of which settled at Notse and built it into a walled town under a line of kings. The last of those kings, remembered as Agokoli, is said to have driven his subjects into forced labour raising the walls ever higher and to have forbidden anyone from leaving. According to the story told at Notse today, the elders organised an escape by having the women pour their wastewater against the same stretch of wall every evening until the mud softened enough to break through, and the population fled at night walking backward so their footprints would mislead any pursuit. Sources differ on when this happened, with some placing the exodus in the sixteenth century and others tying it to a King Agokoli whose reign is dated to the late seventeenth, so the date is best read as the memory of an era rather than as a fixed year. What the record agrees on is the result, since the Ewe scattered west into what is now Togo and Ghana, and Notse still marks the memory each year in the first week of September with the Agbogbo-za festival, a gathering of dance, drumming and ritual reenactment of the flight. Not every group that reached Togo went south and west. In the far northeast, around the Koutammakou landscape that now straddles the Togo and Benin border, the Batammariba arrived after moving south from Mossi territory to escape the tribute demands and raiding of that empire, only to find themselves in the path of slave raiders from Dahomey working the interior for the coastal trade. Their answer to that threat still stands. The takienta, the mud tower houses UNESCO inscribed as a World Heritage Site in 2004, were built as much for defence as for shelter, with thick walls, a single narrow entrance and raised turrets that let defenders fight back from above, the compounds spaced apart across the landscape to make a mass raid harder to carry out. These are not reconstructions. Families still live inside them, farm the land between them, and hold initiation rites at the shrines and sacred groves around them. The other side of that same slave economy left its mark on the coast. Aneho, founded under the name Little Popo by Ane people who had fled Asante pressure near Elmina, grew into one of the busiest slave ports on this stretch of the Atlantic, drawing Portuguese, English, Dutch, Danish and Swedish traders across more than two centuries. Portuguese contact along this shoreline goes back further still, to the fifteenth century, so the two dates mark different stages of one long relationship rather than a single beginning. Local rulers did not accept the trade quietly, and Aneho's chiefs fought repeated wars against the raiding it encouraged even as others profited from it. A short distance west, on the shore of Lake Togo, the town of Togoville grew up as the seat of the Mlapa dynasty, whose kings controlled the lake crossing and collected tolls from those who used it. It was at Togoville, on 5 July 1884, that the German explorer Gustav Nachtigal signed the treaty that gave Germany its foothold on this coast, with a local ruler recorded as Mlapa III. The identity behind that signature has never been settled. Togolese historians point out that the numbering does not track cleanly, since the man remembered as the second holder of the Mlapa title makes a Mlapa III hard to place, and some accounts credit the actual signing to a representative, Chief Plakko, acting in the king's name rather than the king himself. What is not in dispute is what Germany built on that signature: a protectorate its officials liked to call a model colony, pointing to railways, roads and a coffee, cocoa and cotton economy that paid for itself without subsidy from Berlin. The reality behind the showcase involved roughly sixty punitive military campaigns between 1884 and 1902, a colonial police force that grew from a couple of dozen men to well over a hundred as it burned resistant towns and fined or jailed their inhabitants, and forced labour on the railway lines and plantations that drove enough people to flee into the Gold Coast that the administration itself began to worry about losing its workforce. Germany's rule ended within days of the outbreak of the First World War, when British and French forces invaded the colony unopposed in August 1914 and accepted its surrender before the month was out. The two powers split the territory between themselves, an arrangement formalised in 1922 when the League of Nations converted the occupation into a mandate, giving France the larger eastern two-thirds and Britain the smaller western strip bordering the Gold Coast. That line cut straight through Ewe country and hardened rather than healed over the decades that followed. When the United Nations put the question of British Togoland's future to a vote in 1956, the territory as a whole chose union with the soon to be independent Ghana, but the southern Ewe districts of Ho and Kpandu voted by roughly two to one to stay separate and eventually join French Togoland instead, a result the overall national tally overrode. French Togoland, for its part, was declared an autonomous republic that same year and confirmed the arrangement in its own plebiscite months later, before elections in 1958 swept aside the sitting government in favour of Sylvanus Olympio's party and its demand for full independence. The net effect of both votes was to fix a border across the middle of a single people, one that still separates Ewe communities in Togo from Ewe communities in Ghana. Independence came on 27 April 1960, with Olympio as the country's first head of state and, after elections the following year, its first president under a new constitutional order. His government did not last. Olympio kept the national army deliberately small and refused to absorb the Togolese veterans returning from French colonial service, a decision that left hundreds of trained soldiers without a place in the new state and gave men like Emmanuel Bodjolle and Etienne Eyadema, later Gnassingbe Eyadema, a grievance to act on. On 13 January 1963 those soldiers moved against the government, and Olympio was shot dead while trying to reach the American embassy in Lome. It is generally described as the first successful military coup against an independent African government, and the empty chair left for him at the founding meeting of the Organisation of African Unity a few months later became its own quiet warning to the continent about what had just happened. Eyadema did not take power outright in 1963, but he was never far from it, and by 1967 he held the presidency himself. He kept it for thirty-eight years, one of the longest tenures of any ruler in African history, built on a personality cult that ran to a corps of women who sang his praises, his portrait in every shop and public building, a bronze statue in the capital and a comic book that cast him as a superhero with supernatural gifts. When he died suddenly in February 2005, the army moved before the constitutional line of succession could act, installing his son Faure Gnassingbe in the presidency ahead of the parliamentary speaker who should have taken the role. Underneath all of this, a religious life older than any of it kept running. Vodun is not folklore here but a practised faith with priests, shrines and a full cosmology, and nowhere is that clearer than at the Akodessewa market on the edge of Lome, generally described as the largest vodun market anywhere, where monkey skulls, dried chameleons and animal skins are traded not as curiosities but as raw materials for healing and protection, and where a priest on site will diagnose a problem and prescribe a remedy much as a pharmacist would. The other steady thread through the twentieth century was phosphate. Deposits were identified along the coast in 1952 and developed through the later 1950s by a company that became the Compagnie Togolaise des Mines du Benin, and the first shipment left for Japan on 1 September 1961. The state nationalised the industry in 1974 under the Office Togolais des Phosphates, rode a production peak near 2.7 million tonnes in 1997, watched output collapse as the easiest deposits ran out and investment dried up, and has spent the years since rebuilding the sector, with phosphate still standing among the country's principal exports. None of this stays in the past. Walk into a takienta compound in Koutammakou today and a family is still cooking on the flat roof and storing grain in the same tower shape their ancestors built against slave raiders. Stand in Togoville and the basilica built in 1910 sits within sight of shrines still tended by vodun priests, the same lake lapping at both. In Lome's Grand Marche, the boutiques founded by the Nana Benz, the wax print traders who once controlled close to half the country's informal commerce, still stand behind bolts of Vlisco cloth, with the founders' portraits kept on the wall by the traders who followed them. Kpalime, two hours inland, opens onto the coffee and cocoa slopes of Mount Agou, where paths climb past waterfalls to a summit view reaching into Ghana. Fazao-Malfakassa, the largest protected park in the country, still holds the hills and forest that gave the old German railway surveys such trouble. Aneho keeps its colonial quarter and the memory of the slave house that operated there into the nineteenth century, and the coastal road linking it all runs beneath a line of palms with the Gulf of Guinea never far from view. None of these places asks to be seen as a museum piece. A takienta is somebody's home before it is a heritage site, a vodun shrine is a place of active worship before it is a photograph, and the political history bound up in Lome's statues belongs to a family that still governs the country. Ask before stepping into a compound, follow the lead of whoever hosts you at Akodessewa or Togoville, and hold the more recent history lightly enough to notice how much of it is still being lived rather than merely remembered.