Lomé, Togo

Check out my photos from Lomé here. And photos of the fetish market here.

Hi. I'm back from Togo earlier than I expected. Rollo, Sarah C, and Sarah L decided to head north to Burkina Faso the day after we arrived so I came back to Accra. Although I only spent a little over 24 hours in Lomé, my stay in Togo was INTENSE.

The bus ride to Lomé from Accra was three hours long, and crossing the border was fairly easy. No bribery, no interrogation, just a visa processing fee of 30 Ghana cedis (like $US 35). Stepping across the border is like entering into an entirely different universe. It's hard to pinpoint the exact characteristics that make Togo so different from Ghana, but upon first arriving in Lomé the differences are immediately apparent. Lomé is rougher, dirtier than Ghana. In Accra, I feel safer than I do in Chicago's South Side. But in Lomé, I walked around like how I do in Chicago, expecting to get robbed or shot any second.

Perhaps the motorbikes contribute to Togo's crazy, dangerous-like aura, and there are very few taxis around Lomé. People either drive their own motorbikes -- called motos by the Togolese -- or pay someone with a bike to take them to their destination. Riding on the back of a moto is the coolest thing on the planet, and probably one of my favorite things about Togo. I sort of wish we had them in Accra, because riding a moto is significantly cheaper than taking a cab.

The roads are mostly paved in Lomé, unlike those in Accra, so riding motos makes more sense in Togo than it would in Ghana. In general, Lomé's roadways and the layout of the city are really well put together relative to what I've seen in Accra. Togolese architecture is very colonial French, and there were quite a few spiffy-looking buildings and skyscrapers, like nothing in Accra. Even Osu, Accra's most touristy and expensive district, is pretty haphazardly laid out with a jumbo of random office spaces and store fronts compared to Lomé's center city.

Day 1 in Lomé.

The first afternoon, we ran into a Togolese dude named Nass who took us to dinner at an outdoor streetside eatery. The Ghanaians call these food establishments chop bars, and you can get really cheap traditional meals for under a dollar. We drank Togolese beer and had rice with a tomato sauce. After wandering around the city a little, Nass took us to a bar tucked away in a hidden side street. Turns out, the place was a hub for prostitutes, and we all had a chance to dance with a few of the hookers.

"Do you looooooove me," Justinia asked me, rubbing my waist.
"Uhhhhh what? Yes, I do love you," I replied.
"But do you like me."
"I do like you."

I also danced with a group of boys who looked somewhere between nine and twelve. They were the best dance partners I had during my whole stay in West Africa so far.

The dancing was abruptly interrupted, however, when a group of teenagers ran through the alley, closely followed by three Togolese police officers thrashing their whips to part the crowd. The Togolese people didn't mind for more than thirty seconds and quickly resumed their dancing, and several explained that those kinds of incidents happen all the time because the Togolese police were so corrupt and underpaid.

The dancing continued, and there were no mroe interruptions save for the occassional moto that passed through that side street.

Crazy hos and dancing children and police raids and Togolese gin shots... That random alley was seriously amazing.

After that we went home and watched crazy French movies on the hotel TV set. It was only 10:30 pm, but we were beat.

Day 2 in Lomé.

During the morning of our second day in Lomé, Rollo, Nass, and I went to the Grand Marché, Lomé's central market. It wasn't really anything remarkable either in terms of the layout or the products that were being sold. Nothing really authentic or Togolese, only a bunch of fake Louis Vuitton and Prada and stuff like that. Another difference between Togo and Ghana: in Togo, the vendors don't run up to you and rub their wares in your face. The whole market experience was much calmer, and I'm not sure whether that has to do with Togo's longer history of contact with Westerners or whether Togo just doesn't have set methods for dealing with tourists simly because there are so few of them.

On our way to the Grand Marché, we got involved in an incident with the police. Rollo snapped a photo of a building, which turned out to be some kind of government facility. The soldier on duty started raving in French and refused to explain anything in English. We knew he was upset about the photo, but we didn't know what to do about it after the fact. A whole bunch of civilians standing around subsequently got involved in the shouting match en francais, and claimed to be cops. Sure. They all just wanted to milk the situation and get some CFAs (the Togolese currency, pronounced see-fuhs) out of it. Creepily, one of the plain clothes "cops" followed us for at least a mile after we finally got away from that site. He eventually went away, though. It's weird how all those bystanders made the situation worse for us. In Ghana, every passerby would have attempted to defend the unsuspecting obruni (yovo in Togo's Ewe dialect), but the Togolese are so different.

In the afternoon, we met up with the Sarahs at the Marché de Feticheurs, Lomé's notorious voodoo fetish market. Basically the weirdest, creepiest, most illegal thing I've ever seen. The place consisted of tables with rows and rows of assorted animal skulls, some even with the screaming faces of the animal still in tact. Monkey heads, crocodile heads, horse heads, dog heads, hyena heads, leopard heads, horse tails, dried bats and dried chamelions, and bird parts of all sorts. There was even a whole elephant foot used to cure elephantitus. The people running the fetish market are originally from Benin, a West African country situated on Togo's right border (Togo is immediately right of Ghana). Benin, as our guide explained, has the largest voodoo following in all of Africa.

The tour ended with a phoney voodoo ceremony. The guide introduced us to the son of some bogus chief, who took us into a back room and did some chants and explained the six fetishes to us: the traveler's fetish AKA the telephone fetish (because you whisper into the $24 piece of wood and tell it to keep you safe before embarking on your travels...), the fetish of good memory which consisted of an ebony seed, the love festish aka the tell-me-yes fetish, the grigri charm which wards off bad spirits, the family fetish, and the home fetish. There was also a twig called kpedo that was supposed to be the voodoo equivalent of Viagra.

At the end of the ceremony, the guide told us that all of the fetishes were for sale. Rollo asked about the price, but we were told that they do not sell anything. Only the cowries will tell. Bull. Shit. I didn't buy anything, and they insisted that I would have bad luck because of it. And maybe they were right, because right after I refused to buy their trinkets for exorbitant prices, the roll of toilet paper I always carry with me in West Africa somehow got out of my bag and completely unrolled itself and I had to go around the market gathering it back up. Hmmmmm... maybe voodoo isn't so much bullshit after all.

That evening, Rollo and the Sarahs took a bus up to Burkina Faso. I didn't have enough money so I decided to go back to Accra. Crossing the border wasn't a hassle at all, but the ride back from Lome to Accra was exhausting. It took me 7 hours to get back into the city, and every twenty minutes we had to stop for either a police or customs check point. Literally, there were about 20 or so stops during the entire trip. I'm not sure whether it was like that because it was after dark when I traveling back, or whether it's just a lot harder going from Togo into Ghana than it is vice versa.

Overall, I'm really glad I went to Togo, even if it was only for a day. But I'm glad to be back in Accra.