History · Togo

Togo: The Narrow Strip

A ribbon of West Africa less than 115 kilometres wide — Germany's "model colony", split between Britain and France after 1914, and ruled since 1967 by a single family, the longest such grip in Africa

By Worldlore Editorial · 30 September 2026

A tall concrete monument with the outline of a human figure cut through its centre, a pale statue holding a bowl aloft in front of it, set in clipped gardens
The Independence Monument in Lomé, Togo's capital. Togo became independent from France in 1960. (Bamouzou / Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 4.0)

A country the shape of a corridor

Togo is a long, thin country in West Africa, stretching far inland from a 56-kilometre stretch of Atlantic coast, and nowhere more than about 115 kilometres wide. Its roughly 8 million people belong to some 40 ethnic groups, with the Ewe of the south and the Kabye of the north the largest, a division that colonial and post-colonial politics turned into a fault line. Togo's borders are an accident of European rivalry, and its post-independence history has been shaped, almost entirely, by one military family that has held the presidency since 1967.

A short history

  1. pre-1800s

    The peoples of the coast

    Ewe, Mina, Kabye and others; the Atlantic slave trade.

  2. 1884

    German protectorate

    Germany declares a protectorate over the coast, later Togoland.

  3. 1914

    Conquest

    British and French forces take Togoland in August.

  4. 1919–1960

    Partition

    British Togoland (west) and French Togoland (east) are administered separately.

  5. 1956–57

    British Togoland joins Ghana

    Its people vote to merge with the Gold Coast.

  6. 1960

    Independence

    French Togoland becomes the Republic of Togo under Sylvanus Olympio.

  7. 1963

    Assassination

    Olympio is killed in the first coup in Africa's newly independent former British and French colonies.

  8. 1967

    Eyadéma takes power

    Étienne (Gnassingbé) Eyadéma seizes the presidency.

  9. 2005

    Dynastic succession

    Eyadéma dies; his son Faure Gnassingbé becomes president.

The Slave Coast and German Togoland

The coastal peoples — Ewe, Mina, Guin — were part of the stretch of West Africa Europeans called the Slave Coast, and the ports here fed the Atlantic trade for centuries. In 1884 the German explorer Gustav Nachtigal signed a protectorate treaty with a local chief at Togoville on the lagoon, and Germany built the colony of Togoland, running it as a showcase — Lomé's boulevards, a wharf, three railway lines, plantations and a telegraph — financed by harsh taxation and forced labour that provoked repeated resistance. Germany called it its "Musterkolonie", the model colony; Togolese experience of it was considerably less flattering.

A weathered German colonial-era building with arched arcades and shuttered windows in Lomé
A German colonial-era building in Lomé. Togoland was captured by British and French forces in August 1914, after the Germans destroyed their powerful Kamina radio station. (Andrew Moore / Wikimedia Commons)

Partition and independence

After the war the League of Nations divided Togoland into a British mandate in the west and a French one in the east. This cut the Ewe homeland in two and, in the west, separated communities from their historic centres. In 1956 the people of British Togoland voted, in a UN plebiscite, to join the Gold Coast, becoming part of independent Ghana the following year, although a majority in the Ewe-dominated south had voted against. French Togoland moved to internal self-government and then to full independence on 27 April 1960, led by Sylvanus Olympio, a businessman and nationalist from a prominent Afro-Brazilian trading family of the south.

Olympio, and the coups

Olympio governed austerely and tried to keep his distance from France. In January 1963 soldiers — among them recently demobilised veterans of the French army in Algeria and Indochina, whom Olympio had refused to absorb into the small Togolese army — shot him dead at the gate of the US embassy in Lomé. It was the first coup in the African former French and British colonies that had won independence in the 1950s and 1960s, and Olympio one of the first African heads of state killed in a coup. A civilian government followed until 1967, when one of the leaders of the 1963 coup, Étienne Eyadéma (later Gnassingbé Eyadéma), seized full power.

A 1972 portrait of Gnassingbé Eyadéma in military uniform
Gnassingbé Eyadéma, who ruled Togo from 1967 until his death in 2005 — at the time the longest-serving leader in Africa. His single party, the RPT, monopolised politics for decades. (Erling Mandelmann / Wikimedia Commons)

The Gnassingbé era

Eyadéma ruled for 38 years through a one-party state, a personality cult, and security forces dominated by his Kabye base, backed for much of the Cold War by France and the United States. A pro-democracy wave in 1990–91 forced a national conference and multiparty elections, but Eyadéma clung on through violence and fraud; a wave of repression in the early 1990s drove hundreds of thousands of Togolese to flee their homes, many abroad, and the EU suspended aid for years. When Eyadéma died in 2005, the army installed his son Faure Gnassingbé; international pressure forced a hasty election, held amid violence that the UN said killed up to 400 people. Faure has since won repeated disputed elections. In 2024–25 a constitutional change moved Togo to a parliamentary system with a largely ceremonial president; since May 2025 Faure has held the powerful post of President of the Council of Ministers, which has no term limits and is not directly elected — changes the opposition condemned, and which fed protests from June 2025.

What Togo carries

Togo's borders were drawn by Germany and then redrawn by Britain and France, cutting the Ewe in half and yoking a southern coast to a northern interior. Independence began with a coup and a presidential assassination, and almost everything since has been the story of one family's hold on power — through a one-party state, a faked democratisation, a father-to-son succession, and now a constitutional rewrite that critics say is meant to make that hold permanent.

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