Togo was never a single nation or a single people. It was a crossroads where, over the centuries, dozens of groups arriving from different directions settled. Its modern population is usually grouped into some forty peoples, and the country's geography explains much of that diversity: the coast and the humid south, the forested plateaus of the centre-west, the mountains of the north and the Sahelian savannah of the far north offered very different niches to very different populations.
The south is dominated by the Ewe and related peoples, Kwa-speaking farmers who came from the east, from the region of present-day Benin and Nigeria, and whose identity was woven around the memory of a great migration. Alongside them, on the coast, lived the Guin-Mina and other groups linked to Atlantic trade. In the centre are the Tem (or Kotokoli) around Sokodé, and the Ana. The north is home to the Kabyè (mountain farmers who worked stony slopes with terraces), the Losso, the Moba and the Gourma of the savannah, and, in the northeast, the Batammariba or Tamberma.
This fragmentation was no accident: many of these peoples took refuge in hard-to-reach areas such as hills, massifs and isolated lands, precisely to escape the slaving states and the raids that ravaged West Africa between the 16th and 19th centuries. The absence of a great centralised empire, so characteristic of Togo, was partly a survival strategy against the violence of the slave trade. Later, colonial borders would draw straight lines across this mosaic that no people had asked for.
No historical account is as alive in the memory of southern Togo as the exodus from Notsé. Notsé (or Nuatja), a walled city on the central plateau, was in the 16th and 17th centuries the great centre from which the Ewe spread across present-day Togo, southeastern Ghana and part of Benin. According to tradition, it was ruled by a king named Agokoli, remembered as a tyrant who imposed forced labour and forbade his subjects to emigrate.
The legend says that Agokoli forced his people to build an imposing mud wall around the city (remains of the so-called Agbogbo wall can still be seen in places) and that, to humiliate them, he made them mould bricks by mixing the mud with thorns and broken glass. Crushed by the king's cruelty, the Ewe elders are said to have hatched a plan: they had the women throw their washing water against the same spot on the wall every day until it softened, and one night they broke a hole through it and fled en masse, walking backwards so that their footprints would mislead their pursuers.
Legendary details aside, historians place this dispersal around the 16th-17th centuries and see it as a series of migrations that founded the many Ewe subgroups that today share a language and culture on both sides of the border with Ghana. Every September, the Agbogbozã festival brings the Ewe together in Notsé to commemorate that flight. The myth of the tyrant and the wall is not just folklore: it is the birth certificate of Ewe identity, a people who define themselves precisely by having escaped oppression.
Unlike its neighbours (the Ashanti empire to the west or the kingdom of Dahomey to the east), Togolese territory was never unified under a great state. Chiefdoms and small confederations prevailed: the Ewe of the south organised themselves into local political units, while on the coast trading settlements sprang up, such as Glidji and Aného itself, founded partly by Ga and Ane refugees fleeing conflicts on the Gold Coast.
At the heart of this southern culture was, and still is, vodun. Far from the horror-film caricature, vodun is a complex, structured religion, born in this region of the Gulf of Guinea, that worships a pantheon of divinities (the vodun) acting as intermediaries between humans and a distant creator god, and that brings together ancestor worship, divination and traditional medicine. On the shores of Lake Togo, the village of Togoville is one of its great sanctuaries, with its convents, priests and fetishes.
It was in Togoville, in fact, that in July 1884 the German explorer Gustav Nachtigal signed a protectorate treaty with the local chief Mlapa III. From that name (Togo, which in the Ewe language refers to the place "on the other side of the water" or "by the lakeshore") came the name of the whole country. That an entire nation is named after a small vodun village on the shore of a lagoon says a lot about Togo's deep roots. With the Atlantic slave trade, vodun also travelled to the Americas and took root in Haiti, Brazil and Cuba, becoming one of the most universal cultural legacies of this coast.
Togo's short coastline was part of what Europeans called, without euphemism, the Slave Coast: the stretch of the Gulf of Guinea between the Volta delta and the Niger delta from which, between the 16th and 19th centuries, millions of enslaved Africans were shipped to the plantations of the Americas. The Portuguese, Dutch, Danes, English and French set up trading posts along the shore and bought captives from local middlemen, who brought them in chains from the interior.
The main port on this part of the coast was Aného (also called Petit-Popo or Little Popo), founded around the 17th century by Ga traders and refugees from the west. Aného prospered first as a centre of the slave trade and later of the palm oil trade, and became a cosmopolitan town where Africans, returned Afro-Brazilians of mixed descent and European agents mingled. Its later decline left a town of crumbling colonial architecture with a melancholy air, facing the lagoons.
This past can't be sugar-coated. The slave trade depopulated and militarised the interior, fuelled wars between peoples over the capture of captives and pushed many communities, such as the Kabyè and the Batammariba, to take refuge in highlands that were hard to reach. When the European powers banned and pursued the Atlantic trade in the 19th century, the same coast that had lived off slavery became coveted for its trade in palm oil, cotton and other goods, and was ready for the next chapter: formal colonial conquest.
On 5 July 1884, the German explorer and consul Gustav Nachtigal signed the treaty with Chief Mlapa III in Togoville that placed the coast under a German protectorate. This was the birth of German Togoland, which Germany extended inland over the following decades through new treaties and military expeditions, often violent ones, until the territory took on its characteristic shape of a long strip. The Berlin Conference of 1884-85, which divided Africa among the European powers, gave cover to the whole process.
Berlin presented Togoland as its Musterkolonie, its "model colony": the only one of its African possessions to become financially self-sufficient before 1914. The Germans built the port and the capital at Lomé (chosen as capital in 1897), laid three railway lines into the interior, set up a telegraph network and built the powerful Kamina radio station near Atakpamé, which connected Berlin with its colonies and with ships in the Atlantic. They promoted plantations of cotton, cocoa, coffee and palm, and imposed an efficient education and administrative system.
Behind the shop window, however, the "model" rested on forced labour, taxes and corporal punishment. German efficiency also meant extreme harshness towards the African population, and revolts were crushed with fire and sword. The "model colony" was prosperous for Berlin's accounts, not for the Togolese who built it. That double character (modern infrastructure and brutal oppression) would shape the ambiguous memory of the German period, whose mark can still be seen in Lomé's cathedral, the old railway stations and the odd building on the coast.
The First World War abruptly ended Germany's colonial adventure in Togo. In August 1914, French and British troops invaded Togoland from the neighbouring colonies; one of their first targets was the Kamina radio station, which the Germans themselves destroyed on 24-25 August before surrendering on 26 August 1914. Togoland was one of the first German possessions to fall, just after the war began.
With Germany defeated, the powers divided up the spoils. Under the Milner-Simon agreement of 1919 and then under League of Nations mandates granted in 1922, Togoland was split in two: about two thirds of the territory, including the whole coast, Lomé and the railway network, went to France as French Togoland, while the western strip bordering the Gold Coast came under British administration as British Togoland. The dividing line followed the military occupation zones, not the geography of its peoples, and it cut entire communities in two, above all the Ewe.
That line had lasting consequences. After the Second World War, the mandates became UN trust territories, and an Ewe reunification movement grew, calling for the two halves to be joined again. But in a 1956 plebiscite, the British part voted to join the neighbouring Gold Coast, which became independent as Ghana in 1957. So British Togoland disappeared into Ghana, while French Togoland went its own way towards independence. The border that separates Togo from Ghana today is largely that colonial scar of 1919 that divided the Ewe people.
French Togoland moved towards independence led by Sylvanus Olympio, a European-educated nationalist and leading figure of the CUT party. After winning the UN-supervised elections in 1958, Olympio led the country to full independence on 27 April 1960 and was elected president in 1961. A Pan-Africanist who guarded the country's sovereignty closely, he sought to reduce dependence on France, even considering a national currency outside the CFA franc.
His government didn't last long. In the early hours of 13 January 1963, a group of non-commissioned officers staged a coup. Many of them were Togolese veterans of the French army whom Olympio had refused to take into the small national armed forces. Olympio was shot dead outside the United States embassy in Lomé; among the coup plotters was a young sergeant from the north named Étienne Gnassingbé Eyadéma. It was the first military coup involving the assassination of a head of state in newly decolonised Africa, a grim precedent for the whole continent.
After a civilian interlude, Eyadéma seized power directly in another coup in 1967 and ruled Togo with an iron fist for 38 years, until his death in 2005. He established a one-party regime around the RPT, a personality cult and a security apparatus that harshly repressed the opposition; reports of arrests, torture and disappearances were constant. Under international pressure, in the early 1990s he accepted a multiparty opening that was more formal than real, marked by crises, general strikes and mass exile. This period deserves to be named plainly and without embellishment: it was one of the longest dictatorships in Africa, sustained by a northern elite's military control of the country.
When Eyadéma died in February 2005, the army installed his son, Faure Gnassingbé, in power, in a move the international community denounced as a coup. Under pressure, Faure stepped down and stood in an election that he won in April 2005, amid a crackdown that, according to the United Nations, left hundreds dead and thousands of refugees in neighbouring countries. In this way the Gnassingbé family kept power from father to son, in one of the longest-lasting political dynasties on the continent.
Faure Gnassingbé has ruled ever since, re-elected in 2010, 2015 and 2020 in polls disputed by the opposition. In 2017 and 2018, large demonstrations demanded presidential term limits and democratic reforms, and were repressed. In 2024, a controversial constitutional reform turned Togo into a parliamentary-style system and created the post of President of the Council of Ministers, which holds real executive power; in May 2025 Faure Gnassingbé took up this new post, a mechanism the opposition denounced as a way of staying in power beyond presidential term limits.
Beyond politics, 21st-century Togo is a small, poor but strategic country: the deep-water port of Lomé is one of the most dynamic in West Africa, and phosphate and agriculture (coffee, cocoa, cotton) underpin the economy. In the far north, the Savanes region has been under a state of emergency since 2022 because of the spread of jihadist groups from the Sahel. Against these challenges, Togo holds an extraordinary cultural heritage (vodun, Koutammakou, the diversity of its peoples) that is slowly beginning to attract curious travellers keen to discover one of the least-visited corners of Africa.
The 5 histories, one after another. Use the buttons above to jump to the one you want.
Sokodé, Togo's second city, is the capital of the Central Region and the great centre of Muslim Togo. It's the land of the Tem people (also called Kotokoli), whose society was historically organised as a confederation of chiefdoms and who embraced Islam through the trans-Saharan trade routes linking the savannah with North Africa.
The town keeps a strong commercial and religious character: its mosques, its big market and the weaving of boubous (traditional robes) set the rhythm of local life. Sokodé is a meeting point between the Christian and animist south and the Muslim north, and it reflects the religious diversity that defines Togo.
Its most famous celebration is the fire festival, Adossa (or Gadao-Adossa), in which participants, in a trance and protected by rituals, handle burning torches and embers in an astonishing display of courage and spiritual power. It's one of the most intense cultural spectacles in the country and draws visitors from across the region.
West of the Central Region, along the mountain range separating Togo from Ghana, lies Fazao-Malfakassa National Park, the country's largest protected area, covering around 1.900 square kilometres. It's a fascinating transition zone where the northern savannah meets humid mountain forest, giving it a wide variety of landscapes and wildlife.
The park is home to antelopes, buffalo, primates and a wealth of birdlife, and a few elephants still survive, although poaching and pressure on the land have drastically reduced their numbers over recent decades. Park management has had its ups and downs, with periods of neglect and others of recovery backed by international foundations.
Fazao-Malfakassa is a destination for nature travellers ready for adventure: it receives hardly any tourists, infrastructure is basic and spotting animals takes patience. In return, it offers an experience of wild Africa without the crowds, among forested mountains, seasonal waterfalls and silences that few places on the continent still keep.
The city of Kara is the main urban centre of northern Togo and the capital of the region that bears its name. It's the heart of the Kabye people, mountain farmers known for terracing the stony slopes of their massifs, in a harsh environment that demanded remarkable agricultural ingenuity. Historically, many Kabye took refuge in these heights to escape the slave raids of the past.
Kara gained enormous political weight in the second half of the 20th century, because Étienne Gnassingbé Eyadéma, the soldier who ruled Togo from 1967 to 2005, came from the nearby village of Pya. During his long regime, the Kabye north became the base of the country's military power and received investment and public works, while the military elite was drawn largely from this region. That bond between power and the north shaped — and still shapes — Togolese politics.
Today the city is the natural base for exploring the north and, above all, for visiting Koutammakou. There are waterfalls and markets in the surrounding area, and in July the Evala takes place, the season of Kabye initiation wrestling in which young men face off in hand-to-hand bouts as a rite of passage into adulthood.
Every July, the Kara region comes alive with the Evala, the most famous of Kabye traditions. It's a season of initiation wrestling in which young men, grouped by age, face each other in hand-to-hand bouts that form part of their rite of passage into adult life. Winning prestige at the Evala is an honour that stays with a young man for the rest of his life.
The Evala isn't just a tournament: it's a ceremonial cycle lasting several days, with dances, ritual meals, endurance tests and traditional ceremonies that strengthen community ties and pass on the Kabye values of courage, discipline and respect for elders. The wrestlers prepare with special diets and training.
Under the Eyadéma regime, the Evala also took on a political and national dimension, and it remains a major event that draws officials and visitors. For travellers, being there for the Evala means witnessing one of the most authentic and vibrant cultural expressions of northern Togo.
In the north-east of the region, along the border with Benin, lies Koutammakou, the land of the Batammariba (also called Tamberma or Tammari), one of the most extraordinary cultural landscapes in Africa. UNESCO declared it a World Heritage Site in 2004, both for its unique architecture and for the harmony between the communities and their natural surroundings.
The Batammariba build takienta (or tatas), multi-storey mud fortress-houses with towers, granaries topped with conical thatched roofs and separate spaces for people, animals and ancestors. Each house is at once home, granary and temple, oriented according to cosmological principles, and is often described as a small mud castle. The name "Batammariba" means something like "those who knead the earth", the good builders.
Their culture, deeply animist and without central authority, revolves around ancestor worship and a sacred relationship with the landscape. The Batammariba took refuge in these isolated lands to escape slavery and neighbouring states, and as a result they preserved a singular way of life. Koutammakou is the great cultural jewel of northern Togo and one of the most compelling reasons to travel this far.
Lomé is an unusual capital: it sits right on the border with Ghana, so close that its westernmost streets almost touch the neighbouring country. It began as a small Ewe trading settlement in the 19th century and grew on the back of coastal trade. The Germans chose it as the capital of their Togoland in 1897 and gave it a port, railways into the interior and buildings that still stand today, such as the neo-Gothic-style Sacred Heart Cathedral.
After the colonial partition, Lomé remained the administrative centre of French Togoland and then became the capital of the independent country. Today it is home to a large share of the country's population and economy: its deep-water port is one of the busiest in West Africa, a key hub for trade across the whole region, including the landlocked countries of the interior.
The city's working heart is the Grand Marché, historically dominated by the "Nana Benz", women traders who made their fortunes selling wax-print fabrics and became an economic and social force. Between the bustle of the market, the maquis (open-air bar-restaurants) facing the Gulf of Guinea and the German architectural legacy, Lomé sums up the many layers of Togolese history.
On the shores of Lake Togo, across from Lomé, the small village of Togoville carries enormous historical weight. It was here, on 5 July 1884, that the German explorer Gustav Nachtigal signed a protectorate treaty with the local chief Mlapa III, the founding act of German Togoland. From the village's name, Togo, came the name of the whole colony and, later, of the independent country.
Togoville is also one of the great centres of Togolese vodun. Its convents, altars and priests keep the practices of this ancestral religion alive, and the village has a highly revered animist shrine. This spiritual character sits alongside a Christian presence: on the lakeshore stands the church of Our Lady of Lake Togo, linked to a Marian apparition and visited by Pope John Paul II himself in 1985.
Getting to Togoville is part of its charm: many visitors cross the lake by pirogue from the southern shore, on a peaceful trip among birds and fishermen. This village of low houses, so modest at first sight, is both the birth certificate of the country's name and a spiritual capital of vodun.
Before Lomé, the main town on the Togolese coast was Aného, also known as Petit-Popo or Little Popo. Founded around the 17th century by Ga traders and refugees from the west, it prospered first on the slave trade (this was part of the dreaded Slave Coast) and then on palm oil, becoming a cosmopolitan town of Africans, Europeans and returned Afro-Brazilians.
Aného was the capital of French Togoland in the early years of the mandate, before power was finally concentrated in Lomé. It was also at Petit-Popo that French troops landed in August 1914, at the start of the invasion that ended German rule. Its political role faded over the course of the 20th century.
Today Aného is a town of crumbling colonial architecture, with old churches, ruined mansions and a melancholy atmosphere between the sea and the lagoons. That air of past splendour, together with the harsh memory of the slave trade that marked the whole coast, makes Aného a place steeped in history, more for feeling than for photographing.
Togo's coast is one of the cradles of voodoo (Vodun), the religion that was born in this part of the Gulf of Guinea and that, through the Atlantic slave trade, travelled to Haiti, Brazil and Cuba. Far from the caricature, voodoo is a complex belief system, with its own pantheon of deities, ancestor worship, divination and traditional medicine, deeply woven into everyday life in the south of the country.
In a Lomé neighbourhood you'll find the Akodessewa fetish market (Marché des Féticheurs), often described as the largest voodoo market in the world. In practice it's the great "pharmacy" of West African traditional medicine: animal skulls and skins, bones, herbs, figurines and talismans are sold here for Vodun priests to use in their rituals and remedies.
A visit usually includes an explanation from a priest, who shows how amulets are prepared and what each item is for. It can be striking for foreign eyes, but it's an honest window onto a living spirituality that millions of people practise as a matter of course. To understand voodoo is to understand much of the soul of southern Togo.
The Plateaux Region, in the centre-west of the country, is Togo at its greenest and most mountainous. Here the dry coastal strip gives way to a landscape of wooded hills, humid valleys and plantations that benefit from a cooler, rainier climate. Kpalimé, its signature town, is the base for exploring this region of coffee and cocoa plantations, surrounded by waterfalls and trails.
It was precisely these fertile lands that drew settlers and plantations during the German and later French periods, when coffee and cocoa became export crops. The farming tradition sits alongside a renowned craft scene: Kpalimé is known for its woodcarving, batik and weaving workshops, and for a craft school that trained many Togolese artists.
The terrain offers some of the best hiking in the country. Mount Agou, at around 986 metres, is Togo's highest point, and from its summit — reached through terraced villages and banana groves — the views open out over the plateaux and towards Ghana. Mount Kloto, near Kpalimé, is famous for its extraordinary variety of butterflies and its views across the plantations.
In the east of the region, up on the plateau, lies Notsé (Nuatja), the walled town that tradition names as the great centre from which the Ewe dispersed in the 16th and 17th centuries. According to legend, the tyrant Agokoli ruled here, and it was from here that the Ewe fled by breaking a hole through the Agbogbo wall, whose mud remains can still be seen in places.
Notsé isn't a big town today, but it holds a central place in the Ewe imagination. Every September, the Agbogbozã festival brings thousands of people together to commemorate that founding exodus, with parades, dances and traditional ceremonies led by Ewe authorities and chiefs. It's one of the most important cultural celebrations in southern Togo.
The surrounding area was also the setting for major colonial farming projects: the Germans pushed cotton growing around Notsé, using methods that included forced labour. Farming plateau, mythical cradle of a people and colonial stage: Notsé packs several layers of Togolese history into a single place.
Atakpamé, one of the most important towns in the interior, spreads across hills that give it a pleasant climate and panoramic views. Home to Ana-Ife (of Yoruba origin) and Ewe peoples, it was an administrative and trading centre during the German and French periods, and it remains a crossroads for routes heading north and west.
Nearby, the Germans built one of the most advanced works of their "model colony": the powerful Kamina radiotelegraph station, opened shortly before the First World War. Kamina linked Berlin with the African colonies and with ships in the Atlantic, which is why it was the first target of the Franco-British invasion in August 1914. The Germans themselves destroyed the station on 24-25 August before surrendering on 26 August 1914.
Atakpamé is also the gateway to the Nangbéto reservoir on the Mono River, where hippos can be seen, and to a region of hills and waterfalls. Further west, towards the Ghanaian border, the Badou area offers the spectacular Aklowa waterfall, a jet of water plunging down a granite cliff deep in the forest, at the end of a walk through cocoa plantations.
At the country's northernmost tip, where the Togolese strip narrows between Ghana, Burkina Faso and Benin, lies the Savanes Region, with Dapaong as its capital. This is Sahelian Togo: a landscape of dry savannah, baobabs, dusty markets and farming villages, very different from the green, humid south.
The region is home to peoples such as the Moba and the Gourma (Gurma), farmers related to communities in southern Burkina Faso and northern Ghana, with their own languages, chiefdoms and traditions. Life here revolves around subsistence farming shaped by a single rainy season and demanding soils, in one of the poorest parts of the country.
Dapaong is a modest commercial and administrative centre, a stopover on the way to the borders and a base for getting to know the culture of the deep north. Its distance from the power centre in Lomé has historically meant a degree of economic neglect, a trait shared by Sahelian regions across West Africa.
The area around Dapaong hides one of Togo's least-known heritage sites: the region's rock shelters and refuges, such as those at Nano and Namoundjoga. These are caves and rocky overhangs that local people used for centuries as hiding places and homes, especially in times of war and slave raids, when taking refuge in hard-to-reach places was a matter of survival.
These sites preserve stone structures, granaries and remains that bear witness to the long human presence in the area and to the defensive strategies its inhabitants used against the violence that ravaged the interior of West Africa. They're a reminder that the slave trade didn't only affect the coast, but reshaped life for the peoples of the most remote interior.
Alongside this ancient memory, northern Togo shares with the whole Sahelian belt a culture of weekly markets, music and earthen architecture that makes it closer to Burkina Faso than to the Togolese coast. It's a different Togo, austere and fascinating, for travellers with an explorer's spirit.
In recent years, the Savanes Region has become the country's most fragile area for security reasons. The spread of jihadist armed groups operating in the Sahel — mainly from Burkina Faso and Mali — has reached the north of the Gulf of Guinea countries, and Togo has been no exception: since 2021-2022 there have been attacks in the border area.
In response, the Togolese government declared a state of emergency in the Savanes Region in 2022, with a stronger military presence, movement restrictions and security operations. Thousands of people have been displaced, and the arrival of refugees from neighbouring countries has added pressure on a region that was already poor.
This situation has hit tourism in the far north hard, and travel there is generally advised against today. Insecurity in Savanes is an open and shifting chapter, part of a wider regional challenge facing the coastal countries of West Africa as the Sahel conflict spreads southwards.
Hardly anything that happened to Togo happened on its own: these are the histories next door.
