Kpalimé

Kpalimé grew where the road from the coast meets the wooded escarpment of the Kloto hills, in Ewe country close to what is now the Ghanaian border. Its modern shape dates from the German colonial period, when the highlands were found to suit coffee and cocoa and the administration encouraged plantations on the slopes. The German commissioner Jesko von Puttkamer founded the first field station at Misahöhe, 9 km from the town, in 1890, and the Lomé–Kpalimé branch of the railway opened in 1907, making the town the collecting point for the crops of the hills.

The First World War brought the German period to an abrupt end. The frontier drawn after the war, and confirmed when British Togoland joined Ghana in 1957, cut the hills in two and left Kpalimé about 15 km from an international border, with families, markets and farmland on both sides. Under French administration and after independence in 1960, cocoa and coffee remained the basis of the local economy, with prices set far away and fortunes rising and falling with them.

The railway carried freight and passengers for decades before services ended, and the town turned to road transport. Craft work gave it a second reputation, for batik, weaving and woodcarving, and the forest, the waterfalls and Mount Agou drew the first visitors. Kpalimé today is a market and service town for a densely farmed upland, its population swollen by people who have left smaller villages.

The hills are Ewe country, with Akposso and Akébou communities on the higher ground to the north and east, and Ewe is the language of the market and the home while French belongs to school and administration. Traditional authority through village chiefs remains strong, and access to forest paths, waterfalls and farms is arranged through them or through guides they recognise, with fees agreed in advance and shared in the village.

Christianity is strong here, a legacy of the German and later missions, and churches are full on Sundays, with drumming and choirs audible across town. Vodun and older practice continue alongside it, quietly rather than publicly: sacred groves are left uncut, and shrines stand at the entrances to hamlets. Funerals are the great social events, gathering people back from Lomé and abroad, and bringing cloth, brass bands and all-night wakes.

Craft is the town's public identity. Kpalimé is Togo's main centre for wood sculpture, weaving, wickerwork, decorated calabashes, batik, pottery and mounted butterflies, with dozens of workshops and retail outlets and a training college for artisans; the workshops still take apprentices and sell to visitors. Market days set the town's weekly rhythm, drawing farmers down from the hills with head-loads of produce and filling the lorry park before dawn.

About 75,000 people live in Kpalimé, which makes it the fourth-largest town in Togo, after Lomé, Sokodé and Kara, and the main centre of the Kloto area. It is a place of low concrete and mud-brick houses under iron roofs, with the market, the lorry park and the church at its core and farmland beginning almost immediately beyond the last streets.

Farming underpins everything. Cocoa and coffee are the cash crops of the hills, grown on small family plots and sold through buyers in town; maize, cassava, yams, bananas, avocados and vegetables are grown for the household and the market. Trade with Ghana, legal and informal, is constant, and the craft workshops, transport, schools and a hospital provide most of the town's salaried work. Money sent home by relatives in Lomé and abroad matters to many families.

Days begin before dawn with the walk or motorbike ride to the fields, and the market fills early; the hottest hours are slow, and the evening belongs to the maquis and the football on television. Low and unpredictable crop prices, ageing plantations, soil erosion on steep slopes, patchy electricity and the loss of young people to Lomé and abroad are the standing concerns.

Kpalimé eats what the south of Togo eats, with more of the hills in it. Akoumé, the stiff maize dough also called pâte, and fufu pounded from yam or cassava are the staples, eaten with sauces of adémè, made from jute leaves, gboma, a spinach-like green, okra, groundnut or palm nut, usually with smoked fish and sometimes with a little goat or chicken. Ayimolou, rice cooked with beans, is the common working breakfast, sold from great basins at the roadside.

The hills add their own produce: avocados, oranges, bananas and plantain grown between the cocoa trees, pineapple, and forest honey and spices sold in small bottles at the market. Yams from the plateau country to the north arrive by the lorry-load, boiled, fried or pounded. Grilled chicken and brochettes are the standard evening food at the roadside grills, often with fried plantain, alloco, or chips.

Coffee is the town's signature product, grown on the surrounding slopes, though most of the crop leaves the region unroasted and local drinking of it is modest. Palm wine is tapped in the lowlands and distilled into sodabi, drunk socially and poured in libation, and tchoukoutou, the millet beer of the north, turns up in bars alongside bottled lager, bissap made from hibiscus and fresh ginger juice.