The Slave Coast’s thin republic still speaks French officially
Togo, a West African strip between Ghana, Benin, and Burkina Faso, runs north from Gulf of Guinea capital Lomé. From the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries its coast was a European slave-trading outpost in the “Slave Coast.” French is official; Kabiye and Ewe are national languages; Christians are about 49.2 percent.
Covering about 57,000 square kilometres with roughly 8 million people, Togo is less than 115 kilometres wide between Ghana and Benin. Its name comes from Ewe words for water and shore and first belonged only to the lakeside town now called Togoville, before German officials stretched it across the whole colony. Early societies here made pottery and worked iron, and between the eleventh and sixteenth centuries Ewe migrants came in from the west while Mina and Gun peoples arrived from the east, most settling near the sea.
In 1884 King Mlapa III was pressured into signing a paper at Togoville that gave Germany a coastal protectorate, which grew into the colony of Togoland by 1905. Residents were forced to grow cotton, coffee and cocoa and pay taxes, while the Germans built a railway and the port of Lomé for exports. British and French troops forced a German surrender on 26 August 1914, and in 1916 the territory was split in two.
British Togoland voted in 1957 to join the Gold Coast in the new state of Ghana, while the French zone became the Togolese Republic on 27 April 1960. Sylvanus Olympio, its first president, won 100 percent in a vote the opposition boycotted and tried to lessen reliance on France before he was toppled. Gnassingbé Eyadéma seized power in 1967, banned rival parties and ruled for 38 years, the longest of any modern African leader at his death.
When he died in February 2005, the army shut the borders so the parliamentary speaker could not return and installed his son Faure. Elections that April were followed by violence that killed up to 400 people and drove some 40,000 abroad. Faure won a fourth term in 2020 with about 72 percent, and Togo joined the Commonwealth in 2022 hoping for new markets.
Source: Togo
