Togo
Capital: Lomé · West Africa
A narrow band from coast to savanna, uniting Ewe vodun coastlands with the Batammariba's remarkable takienta tower-houses of Koutammakou.
Ethnic communities
- EweCoastal communities; vodun shrines and complex drumming
- KabiyéTerraced farming and forge traditions of the north
- BatammaribaBuilders of fortified earthen tower-houses (takienta)
- Tem (Kotokoli)Central Islamic chiefdoms
More communities of Togo
- Mina (Gen) · Aného coast traders of Afro-Brazilian threads
- Moba · Far-north farmers of ancestral wooden figures
- Gourma · Savanna herder-farmers over the Burkina line
- Bassar · Iron-smelting furnace masters of the west hills
- Konkomba · Oti-plain yam farmers of fierce independence
- Lamba & Losso · Kara-region terrace and initiation cultures
- Akposso & Akebou · Plateau coffee-belt farming communities
- Adele · Border-forest people of old refuge migrations
- Ana-Ife (Yoruba) · Atakpamé's orisha-linked towns
- Ouatchi · Southeastern palm-belt Ewe kin
- Fon & Peul communities · Border Vodun towns and northern herders
Languages
Major languages: Ewe, Kabiyé, Tem, French
Language families: Niger-Congo (Gbe, Gur)
Historical kingdoms & states
- • Notsé (Ewe ancestral city)
- • Tado (Aja origin site)
Heritage sites
- • Koutammakou, the Land of the Batammariba (UNESCO)
Cultural highlights
National heroes of Togo
See all African heroesFigures widely honoured here, across politics, sport, the arts and public life.
- Music & the arts1945–1973
Bella Bellow
Music
Togo's great voice of the 1960s, who sang in Mina and French and was killed in a car crash at 28 at the height of her fame.
- Sportb. 1984
Emmanuel Adebayor
Football
African Footballer of the Year in 2008 and Togo's record scorer, who survived the 2010 gun attack on the national team bus in Cabinda.
- Politics & liberation1902–1963
Sylvanus Olympio
Independence
Led Togo to independence in 1960 and resisted currency and defence ties that would have kept the country dependent. Killed in Africa's first postcolonial coup.
Deep-dive community profiles
Aja
The parent people of the Fon and the Ewe — inhabitants of Tado, the town from which both dynasties trace their origin, keepers of the Vodun tradition at its source, and farmers of the Mono river valley between two countries.
Open deep profile →Ana (Ifè) of Togo
The Yoruba of the Atakpamé hills — a western outpost of the Ifè world, separated from the Nigerian heartland by two borders, who kept the orisha, the language and the claim of descent from Ilé-Ifè itself.
Open deep profile →Batammariba (Tamberma)
The people who build houses like fortresses — makers of the takienta, a two-storey earthen tower-house with granary turrets and a rooftop terrace, whose whole cosmology is expressed in the building and whose valley is a World Heritage site.
Open deep profile →Ewe
The people of the Volta estuary and coastal lagoons whose polyrhythmic drumming, kente weaving and Vodu religion shaped three nations — bound by the memory of a shared escape from the tyrant king of Notsé.
Open deep profile →Fon
Founders of the Kingdom of Dahomey — the disciplined royal state of Abomey with its women warriors, appliqué chronicles and bas-relief palaces — and the heartland people of Vodun, the religion that crossed the Atlantic and reshaped the Americas.
Open deep profile →Gourmantché
The people of the eastern savanna — farmers and hunters of a kingdom that survived alongside the Mossi for six centuries, whose diviners are consulted across the region, and whose country has become the epicentre of the Sahel's insurgency.
Open deep profile →Kabye
The terrace farmers of Togo's northern mountains — iron-working people who turned steep rock into fields, whose evala wrestling initiations turn a whole region out every July, and who have supplied Togo's army and its rulers for sixty years.
Open deep profile →Konkomba
Yam farmers of the Oti plain on the Ghana-Togo border, a people without chiefs who were administered under other peoples' chiefs for a century, and whose demand for their own paramountcy produced Ghana's deadliest post-independence conflict.
Open deep profile →Tem (Kotokoli)
The Muslim traders of central Togo — a kingdom at Tchamba and Sokodé whose long-distance merchants linked the forest to the Sahel, and whose Adossa knife festival at the end of Ramadan has men in trance driving blades against their own bodies.
Open deep profile →Yoruba
One of Africa's great urban civilizations — over 40 million people whose sacred city of Ilé-Ifẹ̀, orisha religion, divination science and bronze-casting mastery have shaped world culture from Lagos to Bahia and Havana.
Open deep profile →