Togolese Diversion

Location:
Togo

togo, french, comparisons with ghana

By Lorna North

July, 2007

We’ve all done it; you go out for a pint of milk and you come back with a Kit Kat and a roll of sellotape. The same thing happened to me the day after I sent my last email. I went out for a loaf of bread and came back with a visa for Togo.

You see during my expedition for breakfast that morning I began to think that whilst being a journalist was beneficial to my C.V, I was only seeing one West African country and it struck me that I could enrich my own experience by indulging in a little border crossing.

People had lately begun to tell me that I was an unusual volunteer. For a start the majority of volunteers only come for four weeks so it became an ongoing joke that I was the ancient mariner who had been imprisoned in Ghana for centuries, unable to leave. Secondly, volunteers hunt in packs and I have a habit of wondering off on my own.

It often happens when I have been living on top of other people for a long period of time that I get these urges for some unadulterated solitude. Don’t get me wrong, living in a house full of travellers like myself was a huge pleasure but I felt like I could do something more challenging.

So I retired from my position at The Chronicle two weeks early having still completed two and half months and having achieved more than I had ever hoped and set off alone for the Togolese border.

I have never been one for logical planning. When I get an idea into my head I give very little thought to the actual process or consequences of my actions. As I was waiting for the tro tro to depart for the border town of Aflao I suddenly realized that I only knew three things about Togo: they speak French, the capital is called Lome and it is situated next to Ghana.

It was only really when I bought a Togolese-French phrase book from a man through the window of the tro tro to re-kindle the remnants of my French A-level that I became concerned about what I was letting myself in for. I was mainly worried by the fact that the book felt it necessary to include the conjugation of the verb “to kill” and for the second person singular used the example “you have killed a person”.

Other phrases included:

“We have killed the thief”

“I have seen the thief that stole my money”

“The car that crashed into the pit has been repaired”

and

“We must leave for war”.

At that point all my French eluded me and the only word I could think of began with an “F”. But by the time my panic had set in the tro tro had left the station and was well on its way to Togo.

If ever there was something that you shouldn’t recommend to the faint hearted, crossing a West African border, overland as a white, single, female would definitely be up there. I overcame the guns angled in my direction and the bribery at every police check but the hardest part of gaining entry into the unknown was my gruelling interrogation in French by the burly Togolese immigration officers. I could walk only two metres at a time down the gauntlet before I was summoned by various different officers brandishing some sort of weapon and scrutinizing my passport as if I’d made it myself with a scanner and some Pritt Stick.

I suddenly became a fugitive trying to convince my legitimacy in a broken language to a trigger happy guard and felt extremely hard done by as I, (the passport, visa bearer) was detained whilst people with chickens, goats and machetes sauntered across the line without a single question.

I eventually made it through, having aged about a decade and abandoned the will to live. I constructed a story about how I had come to meet my British husband in Togo because they seem to dislike the idea that I was a white female travelling alone.

It wasn’t just immigration that was against me on my little Odyssey. I checked into a delightful French-run hostel called “Le Galien” and started to feel uncharacteristically weary. The next thing I knew it was four hours later and I had passed out in bed to wake up to no electricity given the energy crisis in West Africa and had neither the right currency or the faintest idea as to where I was. I also felt like somebody had taken a sledge hammer to my head and had tied boulders to each of my limbs. I concluded that I needed money and drugs in that order so I stumbled out onto the blackened street to find a mode of transport.

This was when I discovered how the Togolese get around. Whereas in Ghana the streets are swarmed with clapped out tro tros and cars, Togo has equivalent mopeds that buzz around like frantic bees during the honey season. There are no helmets, lanes or senses of direction. People just jump on the back, negotiate a price and state their destination praying that the kamikaze driver is neither visually impaired nor drunk. Just as I was preparing to take my maiden voyage on the back of one these so-called zemidjans I saw a young girl fly off the back of one, break her leg and endure horrible road burn. Not the best sign.

So due to illness, my first night was spent mopping my brow, trying not to vomit and coughing my lungs up but by morning I had come to the conclusion that, like immigration, this was not going to thwart my plans of exploration. I found a doctor whose first and only question was:

“avez-vous malaria?”

And from his well informed method of diagnosis I received the right course of anti-biotics. I then sat down to a café au lait and some pain et confiture and watched for a while.

Having lived in a sea locked country my entire life, I seemed to have formed the perception that you need to cross a stretch of water to reach a country of vastly different culture. This meant that when I crossed a border that consisted of walking over a line, I was shocked at how different two national neighbours could be.

There are parts of Lome in which you could deceive yourself into thinking that you were ambling down some Provencal boulevard. Obviously the use of the French language plays a huge part but the Togolese also have that French air of sophistication about them. The market sellers are less aggressive and the place where I was staying accommodated a lot of French ex-pats who sat around all day smoking strong cigarettes and drinking Pastis. The Africans walk around selling baguettes on their head and I half expected to see a Togolese cycle past in a stripy jumper with a string of garlic around his neck. The French influenced culture made me feel as close to home as I have done in three months.

Lamentably my quiet period of reflection over breakfast was then interrupted by a lusty 70 year old Italian ex-pat who wanted me to join him for a swim at L’Hotel Mercure de Lome. It was time to get the bill.

Still feeling horrendous and linguistically challenged, I found my ears honing into the sweet sound of an English spoken conversation. This belonged to a group of American Peace Corps who were based in Togo and who had come down to the city to celebrate the 4th July at the American embassy. So by the evening I found myself dining with the group including the Head of Security at the Togolese American Embassy who chatted with me about the time he protected Jack Straw on a visit to the States. I was then escorted home in an air-conditioned, cream leather interior car with blacked out windows, a remote control ignition and seat warmers (in Africa?!) So having come from one country that was avidly celebrating 50 years free from British colonialism, I then joined celebrations of independence with a load of American nationals in a random West African country.

Slightly fortified by the anti-biotics, I took a leap of faith the following day to travel a little more off the beaten track. After about an hour of haggling I finally got a car to take me to a town called Agbodrafo. During the journey, the driver picked up what seemed to be his entire family. At one stage we were 9 in a fairly small 5 seater which consisted of three African mamas, a brother in the boot, an uncle perched dangerously close to the gear stick, a baby and a toddler across the passengers in the back, the driver and myself.

An hour later I clambered out and took a moment to remember how to move my fingers after having one of the larger ladies awkwardly sit on my hand for the duration of the journey.

By lunch time I found myself crossing an idle lake in a rickety old boat with a rather over-zealous rower who, for the amount of strokes he was taking, really wasn’t going anywhere. Eventually I alighted from the dubious vessel and found myself in an eerily quiet village called “Togoville”. Apart from being overwhelmed by such an original name for a village in Togo, I was also distinctly aware of being somewhere I shouldn’t.

Suddenly all those films where shipwrecked travellers stray upon unchartered villages and are held captive before being roasted on a spit fire as the natives dance around chanting felt disturbingly familiar. In fact, one of the first things I was told by an inhabitant was that I would have to make myself known to the chief of Togoville before I could step any further.

I was lead to the sort of hut you would expect a chief to live in and sheepishly knocked on the door. I was beckoned in by a young man who looked far to junior to be a chief. The room was dimly lit with various ornate Togoville airlooms such as a Holy-Grail-esque object, a mitre, a couple of skulls and a throne. We sat in silence for several seconds until, unable to bear the tension any longer I broke the ice with:

“So you’re the chief?”

He looked rather quizzically at me and replied

“No the chief is in there”

The “in there” he was referring to was a tomb in the ground. I then deduced that that was the chief I was supposed to be meeting. As I didn’t cover the correct etiquette for meeting a deceased chief as a module in my French A-Level I had to make my excuses and cut our rendez-vous short. Before I was allowed to leave the chief’s hut I had to pay my respects in his visitor’s book, the Livre D’Or. So with my pen I profoundly inscribed:

“It was lovely to meet you”.

So that was Togo in a nutshell: Peace Corps, randy geriatrics, fugitive antics and dead chiefs.