The Purple Culture Guide to Togo

Chapter 1: First Impressions

Your first shock is not the heat, as you might expect, but the noise. It’s an immediate, overwhelming assault of sounds that has no off-switch. The bleating of a thousand mopeds, or zemidjans as they are called, is the baseline. Their drivers shout, not at each other, but at you, to get their attention. The tinny, distorted pop music spilling from a shop’s speakers fights with a preacher’s sermon from the next stall. A man is arguing over the price of a pile of oranges with a vendor; two feet away, someone is beeping a rhythm on a car horn just because they’re stuck in traffic. This isn't a soundtrack; it’s a physical entity, thick and palpable as the humidity itself.

If you arrive in Lomé, Togo’s capital, you will first experience this from the window of a taxi, if you can get one, or from the curb, trying to make sense of the anarchy that passes for a traffic system. It seems like there are no rules, only negotiations. The vehicles are a mix of ancient Peugeots that have seen better decades, shiny new Japanese 4x4s with tinted windows, and thousands of motorcycles weaving in and out, carrying everything from a single passenger to an entire family, to a mattress, to a small flock of live chickens bound and squawking. The sheer inventiveness of how things are transported is a sight you will not soon forget.

But wait. You’ll notice something else. Something that cuts