Togo - Pre-colonial History
The Slave Coast was that portion of the West African coast situated between the Volta River on the west and the delta of the Niger on the east, the Benin River being taken as the western boundary of the latter, and thus extended from about 30' east longitude to about 5°8' east longitude.
Geologically, the features of this tract were entirely different to those of the Gold Coast. The latter is hilly, the coast-line showing numerous small hills; and the country inland rising by successive steps in ranges of hills, which culminate in the well-known Adansi Hills, and the Kwao range more to the east. It is covered with dense and impenetrable forest, and the lagoon system extends over but small areas, such as from the Volta River to the westward towards Ningo. To the east of the Volta, however, that is, from the commencement of the Slave Coast, the lagoon system is almost continuous, and, generally speaking, the whole littoral consists of a ridge of sand, varying in breadth from a few yards to two or three miles, shutting off from the sea the broad stretches of shallow water that are termed lagoons.
Like most countries in Africa, the history of Togo began with the migrations of peoples in search of more welcoming and safe places. Among the first settlers found the Kabyés and Lambas , tribes who came from the north between 7 th and 12 th century along with the tribes Tamberma, Akposso and Bassar. The Ewe, one of the largest groups of Togo , came from southwestern Nigeria and first settled in the valley of Mono, which became an important center in the 16th century for trade and agriculture. Other groups followed. The Guins arrived in the 17th century from Ghana today. The Chokossi arrived at about the same time in the region of Cote d'Ivoire , and the Mobas from the Sahel area in Burkina Faso.
The Ewe
The Ewe first moved to the area of Notsé, then to that of Kpalimé, to the coastline and finally the present Ghana. According to history, the Anlo- Ewe people settled at their present home around 1474, right after a dramatic escape from the Notsie, which was an ancestral federated region currently withinthe borders of the modern state of Togo. To celebrate their escape there is an annual festival known as Hogbetsotso Za.
The Ewe language prevailed from the Volta river for a distance of 155 miles eastward along the coast, and inland to an unknown distance, probably about 200 miles. It was also spoken in towns on the right bank of the Volta, namely from Agrafo on the south to Bato on the north, where the people of Ewe stock had migrated across the river.
On the Slave Coast, though there were still many local and tribal objects of worship, there were also a great number of gods who are worshipped by the Ewe-speaking peoples as a whole. It will hardly be disputed that, as the village community is necessarily antecedent to the tribe, the village god must be an earlier conception than the tribal god. As each of these gods was represented by a particular kind of image or by particular paraphernalia, a stranger, upon entering a village, sees objects which were familiar to him, and knew to what gods the various shrines are dedicated; but a native of the Gold Coast, on entering a strange village, would know neither the names nor attributes of the local gods whose shrines he might see.
Slave Coast
European merchants first came to the coast in the 15th century to find slaves. At the head was the Portuguese, followed by the Danes, the Germans, the French and the British. After about 1670, slaving spread along the coast of Lower Guinea from the Gold Coast east past the Niger Delta to the Cameroons-with the core of this region (modern Togo and Benin) acquiring its accurate, if sinister, label as the "Slave Coast". Thus in the 18th century thousands of people were abducted to work in the plantations of the New World.
Towards the end of the 18th century, free slaves in Brazil began to return to settle on the coast where they settled with descendants of Portuguese traders. The "Brazilians" as they were called, practiced the slave trade themselves with Europe and Brazil and imported tobacco and rum from Brazil.
The genetic dispersal that occurred during the Slave Trade remains complex, due to the large diversity of populations involved. Modern African American populations show this genetic diversity, inherited from African, European and Amerindian populations. Nine to ten million Africans were deported to the American colonies during the 16th-19th centuries.
The Bight of Benin (present-day Togo, Benin and a part of Nigeria), also known as the "Slave Coast", was one of the African areas most impacted by slavery between the 16th and 19th centuries, since more than 2,000,000 individuals were deported from its coast. Thousands of people were enslaved each year and sold to European slavers in trading posts, such as in Whydah. A large part of the wealth of the Dahomey and Oyo kingdoms was based on this trade.
Overall, the number of people sucked from Africa into American fields, pits and placers, and sugar-boiling houses rose from hundreds and thousands each year in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries to tens of thousands each year throughout most of the eighteenth century-almost surely around ten to twelve million in all. As prices rose in Africa, as well as in the Americas, and as the British (and also the French) applied to the African trade even a small percentage of the huge commercial capital resources available to them by the eighteenth century, European slavers competed successfully in West Africa with even domestic African markets for agricultural and other labor.
The lagoons were a favorite resort of slavers, and stations were established there by Portuguese, British, French and German traders. The coast natives were dependent on the rulers of Dahomey or Porto Novo. Little Popo and Togo were capitals of small independent kingdoms. Little Popo is said to have been founded in the 17th century by refugees from Accra, who were driven out by the Akwamu. At the time that " the scramble for Africa" began, the narrow strip of coast over which the king of Togo ruled was the sole district between the Gambia and the Niger to which Great Britain, France or some other civilized power had not a claim.
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