Togo

Lomé — the only capital city in Africa that directly borders another country at its city limits (Ghana lies immediately to the west of the Boulevard du Mono — you can walk across the border on foot) — with the Grand Marché (the largest market in West Africa by number of vendors in a single location, dominated by the Nana Benz: the powerful Togolese market women who built fortunes trading Dutch wax cloth and drove Mercedes-Benz cars, giving them their nickname), and the Fetiéché Market (the most important voodoo fetish market in West Africa).

💡 The Nana Benz of Lomé were a class of Togolese market women who monopolised the trade in Dutch wax fabric (the brightly patterned cloth manufactured in the Netherlands for the West African market) from the 1950s to the 1990s. At their peak, they controlled 80% of the fabric trade across Togo, Benin and Ghana, driving Mercedes-Benz cars as a symbol of their success. The liberalisation of the fabric market in the 1990s eroded their monopoly.

The Marché des Fétiches (the largest voodoo fetish market in the world — a covered market in the Akodesséwa neighbourhood stocked with every component of Vodun ceremony: dried animal skulls, crocodile skins, monkey hands, owl feathers, chameleon skins, dried roots and powders — used by traditional healers (bokono) across West Africa) and the Lomé beach (the finest urban beach in Francophone West Africa, with local fishing boats hauled up on the sand and cold Brasseries du Bénin beer in the beach bars).

💡 The Akodesséwa fetish market supplies the traditional medicine practitioners (bokono, or healers) of the Vodun religious system across Benin, Togo, Ghana and Nigeria. The Vodun tradition (the source of Haitian Voodoo via the enslaved Fon and Ewe people transported to the Caribbean) has an estimated 30–60 million practitioners in West Africa — it is the dominant spiritual system across the Bight of Benin region.

1h from Lomé. Lake Togo — a large coastal lagoon separated from the Atlantic by a narrow sand barrier, with the water sports resort of Agbodrafo and the stilt village of Togoville (an island village in the lake, accessible only by pirogue, where Pope John Paul II visited in 1985 — the only time a Pope has visited a fetish-priest community, famously being shown a Vodun ceremony).

💡 Togoville is the ancestral home of the Vodun tradition in Togo — the village’s fetish priest (or voduno) received Pope John Paul II in 1985 during the Pope’s visit to Togo. The meeting between the Catholic pontiff and the Vodun priest became one of the defining images of religious encounter in the 20th century. Togoville is also the site of the signing of a German protectorate treaty in 1884.

3h from Lomé. Kpalimé — the most pleasant town in Togo, at 180m altitude in the Plateaux region, with a colonial-era church and market, the Klöto Mountain (741m, a forested plateau above the town with spectacular views into Ghana on clear days, accessible by a 3h hike through coffee, cocoa and palm plantations) and the finest butterfly population in West Africa — the Centre de Papilloculture (a butterfly farm with 60+ endemic species).

💡 The Kpalimé region has the highest butterfly diversity in West Africa — the combination of moist forest, altitude and the transition between forest and savanna zones creates exceptional biodiversity. The Centre de Papilloculture at Kpalimé breeds and releases 60+ species of West African butterflies; it is the only butterfly research centre in Francophone West Africa.

2h north from Kpalimé. Atakpamé — the capital of the Plateaux region, with the Malfakassa Reserve (a 200m waterfall in intact forest, the tallest in Togo, 3h hike return) and the village markets of the Akposso people (the traditional textile weavers of central Togo, producing a fine cotton cloth with geometric patterns).

💡 The Akposso people of the Togo central highlands are among the least-studied ethnic groups in West Africa — their textile tradition (using a narrow-band horizontal loom similar to kente weaving) produces cloth that is dyed with indigo and other local plants and worn at funeral ceremonies. The cloth is not commercially exported and is rarely seen outside Togo.

5h north from Atakpamé. Koutammakou (UNESCO World Heritage Site) — the living landscape of the Batammariba people, who build tata somba (two-storey mud tower-houses with circular granaries on the flat roof, connected to the family’s spiritual world through the placement of every doorway, window and ceremonial object) — the most architecturally distinctive living vernacular tradition in West Africa.

💡 The tata somba (Batammariba tower-house) is the most complex domestic building tradition in sub-Saharan Africa — each element of the structure has a specific spiritual meaning: the entrance faces east (toward the rising sun), the granary towers (one per wife) are positioned to avoid casting shadow on the entrance, the ancestors’ room is in the northeast corner. The building process involves ritual ceremonies at every stage.

A full day in the Tamberma Valley — the market at Nadoba (the weekly market of the Batammariba, where the women come in traditional dress and the tata somba farmers trade sorghum, millet, dried fish and cola nuts) and a guided walk through the valley visiting the compounds of three generations of the same family, each tata built slightly differently as the family’s spiritual requirements evolved. Fly from Lomé (LFW).

💡 The Batammariba of the Koutammakou region have resisted conversion to Islam and Christianity more successfully than most West African groups — their traditional animist religion (centred on Kuiye, the sun deity, and a complex system of ancestor veneration tied to the architecture of the tata) remains the dominant spiritual framework. The UNESCO listing in 2004 has brought tourism without significantly changing the living tradition.