Lost in Lomé

I arrived in Lavié already sick of Togo, sick of Africa, wanting out.

When Peace Corps notified me at Yale in the spring of 1982 that I would be leaving for Togo in three months, I had to go to the library to consult an atlas. The country was still labeled with its colonial name, Togoland — a sliver squeezed into the West African coast among a crazy patchwork of borders. Over the following months, amid the distractions of getting my degree and saying good-byes, a sense of the place formed in my mind — startlingly clear, hopelessly abstract. The dozen species of venomous snakes Togo was famous for; the bit of wire I would hook to my shortwave antenna for better reception; the Camusian ex-colonials I'd find hanging around waterfront bars, muttering into their whiskeys about freedom and death. And farther out still, I imagined a young country that would be more vital than the money-and success-worshiping one I'd grown up in, struggling with life-and-death issues, forging a new literature that might put to shame our breakfast-table realism.

And then I pictured the tropical cliché. Endless miles of low green bush, with me somewhere in the middle of it, on a cot in a room where light and heat poured in, swatting at mosquitoes and drinking from a canteen. I had grown up in one university, then spent four years in another. I had done well; the future seemed secure enough. But I wanted to leave the path for a while. My reasons for going were not more idealistic or more defined than these. In fact, a few days before leaving I discovered I had no real reasons at all, and, briefly, I panicked.

* * *

It turned out there were no French existentialists hanging on in Lomé, just officials of the cotton company and their tight-lipped wives and stylish children who attended the Ecole Française up the street from the Peace Corps office. A few lime-green vipers flashed across my path. I saw no evidence of political or literary ferment at all. Politics, in the first weeks, seemed to consist of the banners stretched across Lomé's intersections, in Togolese red, yellow, and green, saluting the peace and unity of the rule of His Excellency President Gnassingbé Eyadema. Literature was the twelve-page government daily tabloid, saluting the same thing.

I spent my first three months in training at the junction town of Atakpamé, 120 kilometers north of the capital and 80 kilometers up the road from Lavié. It was a hilly, overcrowded place teeming with battered Renault taxis and women elbowing through the market — boisterous lighter-skinned southern women, remote Moslems from the north in makeup and scarves. We spent most of our time hidden away, first in a mud-hut suburb called Hiheatro down the road, at a cheap two-story hotel with bats in the ceilings, and then in a Catholic girls' school on a hill overlooking Atakpamé. There were about thirty of us: eleven new arrivals, five veteran volunteers to train us, a half dozen Togolese French teachers, and an assortment of young and old men who did our wash, cooked, and cleaned. The school-age workers latched on to volunteers in hopes of being given a permanent job and a place to live once we were dispersed to start teaching.

The idea of training was essentially futile. College graduates without a word of French or a day's teaching experience had ten weeks to learn French, something of Ewé or another local language, and English instruction within the French West African educational system before being packed off alone to teach in a village school. This while suffering from heat and dysentery, pining for letters from home, and wondering if we hadn't been flown to the wrong planet.

Throughout these early months Togo existed only for "cross-cultural" purposes. We learned to eat with the right hand (the left was set aside for the other end of digestion), and to give the proper greetings. On Saturdays we made group forays to the Atakpamé market. These were occasions of terror — the women pushing their way between stalls of tomatoes and imported soaps, with loads on their heads piled three feet high; the babble of Ewé, which sounded angry and directed at us; the heat of the indoor market, its stench of meat going bad and human sweat and its clouds of flies; my pathetic attempts, with my training-manual Ewé, to buy handfuls of peanuts or tins of Chinese mosquito balm from a girl who, along with her friends, burst into giggles. We were like a herd of prisoners being brought out in a cage for public inspection, looking through bars at the world around us and unable to make any sense of it, or to get away from its sounds and smells. A hundred black eyes stared back in.

One evening, when we were still in the village down the road from Atakpamé, our trainers arranged a meeting with the local village elders as a cross-cultural lesson. They arrived an hour ahead of schedule (our first lesson), a dozen aging men parading into the courtyard of the hotel. Hurriedly we arranged chairs in two rows, Africans facing Americans. Most of them had put on their ceremonial robes for the occasion. One ancient man wore a crown that might have been stolen from the props room of a high school theater, cardboard lined with green velvet and pasted with plastic gems; pinned to his robe was a small gold badge with a picture of President Eyadema. He was asleep before we could say "Woezo" ("Welcome") for the third time. The chief-regent had come, and the chief's secretary, the chief of the sister village, a couple of farmers in ragged trousers and shirts, a carpenter, and a stooped, lame old man with a cane, crooked teeth, and alert smiling eyes: the gong-gongeur, who beat the official cowbell that called village meetings.

The village chief himself had recently died. Our Togolese teachers had instructed us not to ask about him. It was customary to keep a chief's death secret for at least a year, and though all the villagers knew the truth, they went on pretending he was still alive.

We asked questions for an hour. The elder who spoke for the group was a muscular man of about fifty, in a black-and-white-checkered robe that left one shoulder bare, no shirt, sunglasses — Ray Charles as a Roman senator. Our questions had to be translated into Ewé by one of our Togolese English teachers, and from Ewé into the local language, Akposso, by one of our French teachers who came from this region. The elder's replies made the trip in reverse. He explained how a chief was enthroned and, if he was a bad one, destooled — which he would be if, for example, he took advantage of a woman with a marital problem who came to him and had to stay the night because the problem was too...