Lome, Togo

Today we’re in Lome, the capital and largest city in Togo. In all honesty, I'm not sure I've ever even heard of it until now. Togo is a small country in western Africa located between Ghana (west) and the Republic of Benin (east). I went to the internet to learn more about the city.

• The current metro area population of Lome in 2023 is 1,982,000.
• Its main exports are coffee, cocoa, copra (coconut meat from which oil is extracted) and oil palm kernels.
• French is the official language but there are 2 major African languages in the north and 2 major African languages in the south.
• Togo is the tenth poorest country in the world.
• One out of every eight Togolese children will not live to see their fifth birthday. UNICEF reports that every 2 minutes a child dies from malaria. In Togo, malaria is the leading cause of hospitalization and the leading cause of death.
• The religion of Togo has remained faithful to the country’s pagan history. This is the reason why 51% of the country’s population has indigenous belief or ancestor worship called *voodoo, while the Christian and Muslim populations consist of 20% and 19%, respectively.
  

We took the shuttle into the market area of town. Even though a different country, it was very much like some of the other places we’ve visited with all the outdoor buying and selling. Today we walked through a craft area where we couldn’t have stood out more if we’d had 2 heads! Being the only white people, one look at us and they see TOURIST. I actually would have enjoyed looking around more but the craftsmen were extremely pushy. Not only that, if you looked at something, the person selling it would start following you and keep showing you that item as you continued to walk along. At some point, it made you wonder if you were ever going to lose them!

Between the heavy push to buy and the heat and humidity, it didn’t take much for us to decide to catch the next shuttle back to the ship. I would have liked to looked more and taken more photos, but given the circumstances, I was most agreeable to leaving the area.

* Explanation of voodoo if interested. https://www.watchman.org/profiles/pdf/voodooprofile.pdf

I'll share some of my photos from today. The first ones are of a group of drummers/dancers who set up in the dock just outside our ship. We learned that ours is the first cruise ship this year that has stopped in Togo. The remainder are of our short walk through a craft market.

where is Togo?

dancers at the port

 

I don't know the name of the dance above, but I'm told that the person in the masked (furry) costume (on the ground in this photo) supposedly goes into some kind of trance and disappears. There's definitely something creepy about it!

dancers and stilt walkers

craft market

carrying eggs on her head?

dress shop

large building under construction (taken through bus window)

the makings of a salad?

favorite photo of the day

all things crafty

blocks of booth after booth

Buy me!