Kara

Kara sits where the highway north crosses the Kara river, beneath hills the Kabye have farmed intensively for centuries, terracing the slopes in stone and manuring them by hand to feed a dense population on thin soil. The hills were a refuge, defensible and awkward for outsiders, and the settlements on them long mattered more than anything on the plain below.

The town on the river is a colonial creation: a bridge thrown over the Kara by the German administration in 1902 marks its beginning, and under later French rule the place then known as Lama-Kara grew slowly as a market and staging point on the road north, at the crossing of the highway and the east–west route from Bassar towards Benin. Crowded hillsides pushed many Kabye into migration, first as forced labour on colonial plantations and roads in the south and later as voluntary migrants to Lomé and the cocoa country.

The city's transformation came after 1967, when Gnassingbé Eyadéma, a Kabye born at Pya nearby, took power. Kara was made the centre of the north: the highway was improved, ministries opened branches, a stadium, hotels and wide boulevards were built, and the surrounding villages received attention and investment. Kabye men were recruited in large numbers into the army. The pace of building slowed after the 1990s, and the city's buildings still carry the stamp of that era, but the university founded in the 2000s gave it a new role, and Kara remains the administrative and commercial capital of northern Togo.

Kara is the centre of Kabye country, and the Kabye mark the stages of life with public ceremony. The Evala, held each July, brings young men back from Lomé and abroad to wrestle in the villages in bouts watched by whole communities: the matches confirm passage into adulthood, and the reputations won at them last for years. The Akpema is the parallel rite for young women, with processions and formal dress. These are rites, held in the villages and organised by families and elders; visitors watch on sufferance and with permission.

Traditional religion remains strong alongside Christianity and Islam, expressed in ancestral shrines, sacrifices at planting and harvest, and the authority of elders and chiefs over land and disputes. The stone terraces, granaries and round houses of the hills are themselves cultural inheritance, maintained collectively.

The city is more mixed than the hills. Students from across the country, traders from Sokodé and Bafilo, soldiers and civil servants give it a wider mix of languages and faiths, with mosques and churches within a few streets of each other. Wrestling and football are the local passions, and evenings pass over tchoukoutou in courtyards, where a calabash is shared and passed rather than bought by the glass.

Kara had 94,878 people at the 2010 census and has grown since, making it one of the largest cities in Togo and the main centre of the north. It spreads low and wide along the highway and the river, with the market and administrative buildings at its core and farming villages beginning immediately beyond the last streets.

The economy is administration, trade and transport: the regional government, schools and hospital, the university, the market that gathers the produce of the hills, and the lorries and bush taxis working the highway to Burkina Faso. Farming underlies all of it — sorghum, millet, maize and yams, with cotton as the cash crop, shea nuts gathered by women, and cattle, goats and guinea fowl. Remittances from relatives in Lomé and abroad keep many households going.

The year follows the rains: intense work in the fields from May, and a dry season of markets, funerals, house repairs and ceremony. Days begin before six and pause in the afternoon heat. Poverty is deeper here than on the coast, jobs for graduates are scarce, water and power supply are uneven, and the insecurity further north has pushed displaced families and higher transport costs into the region.

The staple is pâte, a stiff dough of sorghum, millet or maize flour, eaten with sauces of leaves, okra, groundnut or baobab, commonly seasoned with fermented néré seeds, a dark, pungent condiment used across the West African savanna. Yams, grown in quantity to the west around Bassar, are boiled, fried or pounded into fufu, and rice appears at celebrations and in roadside dishes.

Meat is eaten less often than on the coast but matters at festivals: guinea fowl, goat and beef are grilled over charcoal or stewed in sauce, and brochettes are sold at the roadside in the evening. Shea butter, made by women from nuts gathered in the bush, is the cooking fat of many villages, and dried fish from the rivers and from the south flavours sauces. Fried bean cakes, yam chips and rice with beans are the everyday street foods.

Tchoukoutou, the millet or sorghum beer brewed by women and served warm in calabashes, is the drink of the region and part of every ceremony, funeral and market day; in Muslim households and towns, sweet millet drinks, bissap made from hibiscus and ginger juice take its place. Bottled lager and sodabi, the palm spirit from the south, are sold in the city's bars.