The history of Togo

Togo is a narrow strip of land running nearly 600 kilometres inland from a short Atlantic coastline. Before colonial rule it was not one state but many: highland farming communities, iron-working centres, small kingdoms in the north and Aja and Ewe towns in the south, squeezed between the powerful neighbours of Asante and Dahomey. Its coast was part of the "Slave Coast" of the Atlantic trade, and in 1884 it became the German colony of Togoland, which was split between Britain and France after the First World War. French Togoland became independent in 1960, but within three years its first president had been killed in a coup, and since 1967 the country has been ruled by Gnassingbé Eyadéma and then his son Faure Gnassingbé.

People have lived in what is now Togo since the Stone Age. In the far north, in the Oti valley, archaeologists have found stone tools, rock paintings and the remains of early iron smelting. The country's oldest communities were often in the hills: peoples such as the Kabye, Lamba, Akposso and Akebu settled the Atakora range and other uplands, where the cooler climate, good soils and steep slopes offered safety from disease and, later, from slave raiders. They built terraced fields and stone-walled compounds, and many of them kept ways of life that changed little for centuries.

Iron was central to the region's history. Around Bassar, in the north-west, smelters produced iron on a large scale for centuries and traded it across the region, and iron-working remains have been found at sites throughout the country, from Kloto to Haho. In the north-east, the Batammariba built the distinctive two-storey mud tower-houses called takienta, and their land, Koutammakou, is now a World Heritage Site.

The south belongs to the world of the Aja and their relatives, whose languages, including Ewe, Fon and Gun, are spoken from the Volta River in Ghana to the Ouémé in Benin. According to tradition, a prince called Togbé-Anyi led migrants from the Yoruba country to the east and settled at Tado, near the Mono River, where they allied with the local blacksmiths, the Alou. Archaeology confirms heavy iron-working at Tado around the 11th and 12th centuries, and Tado became the main political and spiritual centre of the Aja. Groups that later left it founded new states, including Allada in what is now Benin around the late 16th century, from which the kingdom of Dahomey would grow.

The Ewe trace their own origins to Notsé, a walled town in southern Togo. Their best-known tradition tells of a cruel king, Agokoli, who forced his people to build a wall around the town and set them impossible tasks, until in the 17th century they escaped by night, walking backwards so that their footprints seemed to lead into the town. They then spread out across southern Togo and south-eastern Ghana in many small, independent chiefdoms. The story is a legend, but the earthen walls of Notsé still survive.

The Portuguese sailors João de Santarém and Pêro Escobar passed along the coast in the early 1470s. The shore had no natural harbours, and Europeans built their main forts elsewhere, at Elmina to the west and Ouidah to the east, but the coast between them became part of what Europeans called the Slave Coast. From the 16th to the 19th centuries, local rulers and merchants sold captives to European ships, and the Atlantic slave trade shaped the politics of the whole region. Around 1700 migrants from the Gold Coast, Ga and Fante fleeing wars there, founded Aného and Glidji, and the Guin or Mina people of these towns became important middlemen in the trade. In the 19th century, Afro-Brazilian traders, some of them formerly enslaved people who had returned from Brazil, settled on the coast and played a leading role in commerce.

Inland, the small states and village communities lived under pressure from two great powers. To the west, the Asante Empire dominated the trade routes and raided for captives, and to the east the kingdom of Dahomey, a tributary of the Oyo Empire, did the same; under King Agaja in the 1720s and 1730s Dahomey conquered the coastal kingdoms near the Togolese border. In the north, two kingdoms did form: the Anufo, or Chakossi, migrants from what is now Ivory Coast, founded a state centred on Sansanné-Mango in the 18th century, and the Tem, or Kotokoli, built a state around Sokodé. Both lay on the caravan routes that carried kola nuts, cloth and slaves between the forest and the Hausa cities and the trading towns of Burkina Faso and the Niger.

By the 1880s German trading firms were active on the coast, and in the Scramble for Africa Germany moved to secure it. On 5 July 1884 the explorer Gustav Nachtigal signed a protection treaty with Mlapa III, the ruler of Togoville, on the shore of Lake Togo, and the name Togo, from an Ewe phrase usually translated as "beyond the water", was extended to the whole colony. Over the next two decades German forces pushed inland, fighting campaigns against peoples such as the Konkomba, the Kabye and the people of Bassar, and borders were drawn with the French in Dahomey and the British in the Gold Coast.

Lomé, a small village, became the capital in 1897, and the Germans built a pier, a port and three railways inland, the first from Lomé to Aného opened in 1905. The German Empire called Togoland its "model colony" because it paid for itself, but this was achieved through heavy head taxes and forced labour on roads and railways, and through cash crops such as cotton, cocoa, palm oil and coffee. Corporal punishment was routine, and in the north many men were sent south as labourers.

In the First World War, Togoland was the first German colony to fall. British and French troops invaded in August 1914, aiming for the powerful radio station at Kamina, which the Germans destroyed before surrendering on 26 August. The territory was divided, and in 1922 the League of Nations confirmed the partition: Britain received a narrow western strip, administered as part of the Gold Coast, and France the larger eastern part, including Lomé and the railways. The border cut through the Ewe homeland, and after the Second World War an Ewe unification movement petitioned the United Nations, which had taken over both territories as trusteeships, for the Ewe to be reunited.

In French Togoland, politics was dominated by two parties. The Committee of Togolese Unity, led by Sylvanus Olympio, a businessman of Afro-Brazilian descent, wanted independence and closer ties with the Ewe across the border, while the Togolese Party of Progress, led by Nicolas Grunitzky, favoured close links with France and drew strength from the north. In 1956 the people of British Togoland voted in a plebiscite to join the Gold Coast, which became independent as Ghana under Kwame Nkrumah the following year, ending hopes of reuniting the two halves. France made its part an autonomous republic with Grunitzky as prime minister, but in 1957 colonial troops fired on a crowd at the market of Pya-Hodo in the north, killing about twenty people, and a United Nations-supervised election in April 1958 gave victory to Olympio.

Togo became independent on 27 April 1960, during the wave of decolonisation in Africa, with Olympio as its leader. He was elected president in 1961, his party taking every seat after Grunitzky's party was disqualified, and in 1962 he dissolved the opposition parties. He kept a tight budget, sought to reduce dependence on France, and quarrelled bitterly with Nkrumah, who supported Ewe and other opponents of his government.

On 13 January 1963 a group of soldiers, many of them northerners recently discharged from the French colonial army whom Olympio had refused to take into Togo's tiny army, attacked his house and shot him dead outside the United States embassy. It was the first military coup in independent French-speaking Africa. One of the soldiers, Sergeant Étienne Eyadéma, later claimed to have fired the fatal shot. Grunitzky returned from exile to lead the government, but four years later, on 13 January 1967, Eyadéma, now a lieutenant colonel and army chief, removed him in a bloodless coup.

Eyadéma, a Kabye from the north, banned political parties and in 1969 created a single party, the Rally of the Togolese People. He built a personality cult, rewarded his supporters with jobs in an army dominated by northerners, and had opponents imprisoned, tortured or killed. During the Cold War he was a firm ally of France and the West. The nationalisation of the phosphate mines in 1974, at a time of high world prices, briefly made Togo prosperous, and Lomé hosted the signing of the Lomé Convention between Europe and African, Caribbean and Pacific countries in 1975. When prices fell, the country sank into debt.

After the revolutions of 1989 in Eastern Europe, protests spread through Lomé in October 1990. A national conference in 1991 declared itself sovereign and appointed a transitional prime minister, Joseph Kokou Koffigoh, but the army attacked his office that December, and Eyadéma gradually regained control. In January 1993 soldiers fired on demonstrators and rampaged through Lomé, and over 300,000 people fled, many to Ghana and Benin. A long general strike crippled the economy, and the opposition boycotted the presidential election of 1993, which Eyadéma won with 96 percent of the vote. He was re-elected in 1998 and 2003 in elections marred by fraud, after the constitution was amended to remove term limits and to exclude Gilchrist Olympio, the son of the murdered president, who lived in exile.

Eyadéma died on 5 February 2005, after 38 years in power, then the longest of any ruler in Africa. The army immediately installed his son, Faure Gnassingbé, as president. After the African Union and the regional bloc ECOWAS condemned the move as a coup, he stepped down and stood in an election in April, which he was declared to have won. The opposition rejected the result, and in the violence that followed, hundreds of people were killed, mostly by the security forces, and some 40,000 fled the country. An agreement with the opposition in 2006 led to legislative elections in 2007 that observers judged largely fair, though the ruling party kept its majority.

Faure Gnassingbé was re-elected in 2010, 2015 and 2020, each time amid accusations of fraud, and large protests in 2017 and 2018 demanding his departure were dispersed by force. In 2022 Togo joined the Commonwealth. In 2024 parliament adopted a new constitution that turned the presidency into a largely ceremonial office elected by parliament and created a powerful new post, President of the Council of Ministers, with no term limits. In May 2025 the new system took effect: an elderly politician, Jean-Lucien Savi de Tové, became president, and Gnassingbé took the new post, which opponents called a constitutional coup. In June 2025 young protesters took to the streets of Lomé after the arrest of a critical rapper; the security forces cracked down, and at least seven people were reported killed. The Gnassingbé family has now governed Togo for nearly six decades.