Letter from: Togo, a forgotten nation trying to forget its past

The border between Ghana and Togo came after a few false starts but the open concrete mouth of the checkpoint was now in view. As the minivan stumbled and stopped, sweaty hands plunged through the open windows and began shaking wares: phone credit, packets of biscuits in metallic wrappers, leather belts and beaten blocks of CFAs ready to be exchanged at rip-off rates.

Mouths, eyes and then full faces soon became visible, as the names of items and basic adjectives like “good”, “nice”, “good price”, were drummed out. The cacophony, the fierce eye contact, the pulling and pushing were all part of a makeshift strategy to wear travellers down into submission before they departed with their cash. But tired travellers, such as myself, often moved mindlessly past the vendors, more focused on reaching the checkpoint without being swindled or robbed.

The frontier town of Aflao was like most Third World border towns: weathered and worn, nondescript in its relentless hustle and dull in its desperation. I stood before a Togolese immigration officer and clumsily filled out my entry form, vaguely recollecting who I was, where I came from and what reasons I might have for going to Togo. I was travelling to Lomé to witness the politically contentious Liberation Day festivities that celebrated the assent to power of a Togolese soldier named Gnassingbé Eyadéma through a coup he staged exactly four years after he was involved in the assassination of the nation’s first democratically elected president, Sylvanus Olympio. But on the ledger lines of those thick immigration books I was a tourist.

A few metres on and to the left, beyond the grubby concrete arch that marked the boundary between here and there, were Ghanaian officers slumped over desks and dolling out strange surveys that seemed to serve the function of entrapping illegal Togolese immigrants.

Look. Stamp. Sign.

With most border crossings, once you get beyond the men in uniforms with big guns and the concocted visa problems (which in this part of the world often demand an informal financial solution) the landscape and culture rolls, on at least for a bit. But something had changed as soon as I had entered Lomé. It was the dust.

Every year the hot Harmattan trade winds blow from the Sahara down through West African countries and into the Gulf of Guinea. On the Aflao side, dust was generated by a synthesis of nature and human movement. But the dust in Lomé somehow seemed different.

The dust was a thin grey skin covering the coconut trees and dilapidated colonial and Afro-Brazilian buildings that lined the Boulevard de la Marina. A few people lay on the sand in the shade as women swept the footpaths with bundles of sticks. The sky and the sea looked like faded postcard drained of colour and an old jetty that had been built by the French reached out to the horizon, only to rust and collapse at its end. Squatters had occupied the crumbling government buildings that had once stood grand when the nation was called Togoland and was a German protectorate before the French took over at the end of World War I.

On the corner of the potholed Boulevard du 13 Janvier, named as such to mark Eyadéma’s ascent to power, was the old Germanic presidential palace standing far from a concrete fence that had been scratched with graffiti. The current president, Eyadéma’s son, Faure Gnassingbé, who seized power in a military coup after his father died in 2005 and won last year’s elections, lived further out of the city behind high iron gates that were manned by the Gendarmarie. With its broken buildings and backstreets coated with thick sand, Lomé appeared like a beat-up town with a forgotten past and an unknowable future.

On a map of Africa, the Togolese Republic is barely visible and appears as a small sliver of land dividing Ghana and Benin. The West African nation has a population of about 6 million that has had a long history of political violence and repression, but has received little media attention in recent decades because of its size and perceived lack of regional political and economic importance. But despite Togo’s political and economic stagnation over the past 40 years, largely a product of Eyadéma’s brutality and extravagance, the nation held its first “free” presidential elections in decades last March. The elections were supervised by external monitors and deemed flawed but basically fair by the European Union, the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) and the African Union. However, opinions on the legitimacy of the election differ within Togo.

The republic made inroads to political reform and reconciliation and has been attempting to come to terms with its brutal past. Late last year, leaders within the dominant opposition party the Union des Forces de Changement (UFC) were divided over the party’s decision to join the ruling party, Rally of the Togolese People (RPF), in a “coalition government” that gave the party seven out of 32 ministerial positions. But a splinter group, called the L’Alliance Nationale pour le Changement (ANC), headed by Jean Pierre Fabre, Olympio’s ally turned rival, claim that the election was fraudulent and that Fabre is the elected president. The party and its members said Olympio’s willingness to negotiate with the Gnassingbé’s party and government only reinforces the power of an authoritarian regime and have been holding peaceful demonstrations in recent months demanding that the government acknowledge Fabre as the winner of the elections.

On Janvier 13, (January) I accompanied Gilchrist Olympio to his father’s home town of Agoué in an area of Benin that was formerly a part of Togo. Liberation Day was historically celebrated with national military parades that waned in their scale after Eyadéma’s death, but every year Olympio traveled with an entourage of family, friends and party members. While Olympio mourned his father’s assassination in an event that was personal and political, back in Lomé, Gnassingbé and the RPT made a gesture of reconciliation that had been months in the making. Gnassingbé had called off the military parades, and commemorated the death of Sylvanus Olympio at a church service, alongside UFC party members, perhaps signifying an end to Liberation Day altogether.

The following day I met Gilchrist Olympio in his house. Olympio, a large softly spoken man of 74 years, told me that Gnassingbé ’s commemoration of his father’s death was a positive symbolic gesture, but that further steps needed to be taken to bridge the political divisions between the two parties and address the major developmental problems the nation faces.

Olympio responded to my questions with calm air and a mixture of direct answers, casual meandering and the proverbial rhetoric of a statesman. But when I asked him to respond to Fabre’s claims that he and the UFC were supporting a dictatorial party, Olympio responded with a hint of bitterness. “I don’t think Fabre and company are a major political force in this country,” he said.

Olympio, who does not officially hold a position in the government, said that his party would continue to play an advisory and watchdog role and negotiate with the RPT government. He also admitted that the elections were not entirely free and fair and there was an abnormally high level of abstention, but claimed that the only way forward was to co-operate with the RPT government: “You cannot run a country on such deep divisions; look at the Ivory Coast. This is what has wrecked our country and I think we are overcoming this.”

Deep divisions continue to be a major part of Togolese politics, but the government has responded to international pressure and taken significant steps to address the human rights abuses of the past and reformed the nation’s economic institutions and made them more accountable and transparent. In 2008, the government with the assistance of the European Union and the United Nations Human Rights Commission initiated a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to address the human rights abuses and political violence that took place between 1958-2005. The commission has received over 18,000 submissions and is expected to report its findings later this year. The World Bank and International Monetary fund also relieved Togo of 82% of its debt ($US1.8 billion) for implementing economic reforms. Rural roads have been paved, bridges reconstructed and the physical markers of change and development are visible.

But there are many who think that these political and economic changes are superficial and that Togo must reform its political system and culture on a deeper level. When I spoke with an ANC party member, who requested not to be named, he said that Togolese people had felt betrayed by Olympio and that police corruption and brutality continued to be a problem.

Guillame Coco, an activist with the Mouvement Citoyen pour l’Alternance (MCA), also thought that little had changed. Coco had been detained with 15 other activists by police before the election results were announced and was held for more than six months in prison. Coco’s case was monitored by Amnesty International until his release late last year. Coco claims that the only reason he was not physically harmed or tortured was because local and international human rights groups kept a close eye on his case.

Coco was arrested with other members of the MCA because the government claimed the group were planning to stage a coup. Coco used strong militant rhetoric when he spoke however, he dismissed claims that the MCA was planning to overthrow the government. Coco said he thought that he had no faith in the leadership of Olympio or Fabre: “This government it not prepared to let go of power.”

While many Togolese political activists and citizens continue to be cynical about the outcome of the election, Amnesty International Togo director Aimé T. Adi said that small improvements have been made and that the number of reports of human rights abuses allegedly perpetrated by the government had lessened in the past year.

Amnesty International has operated clandestinely in Togo over the past 16 years, but Adi said that the organisation now has more freedom to work and has participated in consultations with the government’s National Human Rights Commission. Adi said that post-election violence continued be a major issue, particularly because the government has often used military force to deal with protesters.

As Adi walked me out of his office and to the main road he said they were considering putting a large sign out on the road but thought it was too early to take the risk: “We are hoping and praying for change, but the situation in Togo can turn very quickly.”