Taxis and Taxidermy in Togo

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About three weeks ago Akima (the girl from Grenada), Angela (the girl from Canada) and I decided to go to Togo. We’d all stumped up the extra cash for a multiple-entry visa before coming here, and so we were determined to get out of Ghana at least once.

It’s about three hours drive from Accra to the border town of Aflao so we set off early on Saturday morning, bumping along the rather potted road which runs from Accra along the coast to the Togolese capital, Lomé. The road runs through the Volta Region on the easternmost side of Ghana and it is a beautiful part of the country. Lush tropical vegetation, neat little villages and market towns lining the roads, and an unbroken line of beach punctuated with the traditional carved fishing boats and stalls selling fresh fish.

The issue with the taxi really started before we even crossed the Togolese border. It’s just a big fence, with various offices on either side, and a gate to let cars through, but even at this early stage the difference between the two countries was palpable. On one side of the fence you were ushered through a pretty efficient system of smartly-dressed immigration officials, thoroughly questioned about your origins and destination and handed a neatly-printed card to fill in. It wasn’t enough to put ‘UK passport office’ for where I got my passport - I had to ring home and find out the exact town. In spite of these checks and double-checks, the whole process was over in a matter of minutes.

Then we got to Togo. The immigration desk was a table wedged in an open passage, and the man seated at it was sporting a flashy pair of sunglasses and swigging Star Beer out of the bottle. The forms had been run off a photocopier somewhere, and the price for a Togolese visa was a baffling and completely arbitrary charge which depended entirely on your country of origin. (Angela had to pay double the amount I was charged simply because she was from Canada). To make matters worse, the guy was clearly in the wrong job. Watching him process our passports was rather like watching a long and tortuous episode of ‘Art Attack’. There were various stamps, in various different inks, each of which then had to be filled in with pens in particular colours. There was a little square of paper which needed to be stuck down with a glue-stick, and a space for a signature which seemed to require leaving the room for about ten minutes (during which I really did wonder if I would ever see my passport again and felt relieved that I had a photocopy at home!)

Meanwhile there was another bloke in a white T shirt who was being irritatingly helpful. No job was too small - he carried our forms, pointed us in the rather obvious direction of the desk, loitered as we waited for our passports, and reassured us that the prices were, of course, entirely accurate (this was ‘proved’ by showing Angela an entry in the log book which only proved that another Canadian had been forced to pay the say price two months ago). We thought it was a bit odd, but we assumed that he was somehow in the employ of the Immigration Service, or at least in league with the arts-and-crafts pro at the desk.

Of course, there really is no such thing as a free lunch. As soon as we were finished with our visas he was asking us to take his car instead of a taxi to get into central Lomé. He told us that the taxi drivers were all “voleurs” who would rip us off, and that we would be safer with him since he worked for the immigration service. We had no idea - we’d just arrived, and it was pretty obvious that we couldn’t rely on things in Togo to be anything like things in Ghana. Akima asked some people sitting outside the immigration building which option would be “plus secure”, and they all pointed at T Shirt Man.

Now, I know you’re never meant to take unmarked cars, and I know we should have told him to sling it, help or no help (and I did say those things at the time) but it’s easy to be wise with hindsight, and to be honest, we had no guarantee that a taxi was a much safer option. You read horror stories about taxi drivers all the time - even in good old Ghana, and it’s not like you ever have the option of using a reputable, centralised firm. T Shirt Man was charging exactly the same price as the taxi we spoke to, and it seemed quite possible that he really did work for the immigration service. Plus, he had waited and been very helpful…

We got into T Shirt Man’s car, and he took us to the main market in Lomé.

Now at this point I must take a bit of a detour to tell you about the taxidermy - or lack thereof. Togo is a country famous for its Voodoo heritage - a culture which, it turns out, is about far more than sticking pins into dolls. Voodoo is one of the main traditional religions in this part of the world, and, while I’m not qualified to go into the details, a big part of it is enacting certain rituals involving what they call ‘fetishes’. These, I quickly learned, were not fetishes in the dodgy sense, but a word for the various artefacts and animal parts which are needed for the rituals.

If you are a raging animal rights activist you may wish to skip this bit and go straight to sending me hate mail via Facebook.

I don’t know if I ever had any definite idea of what to expect, but I think I imagined something rather like the souvenir stalls in Accra, only rather more dominated by animal products. I pictured perhaps a polished skull, a treated animal hide, a string of little white bones. I was even bracing myself for the more controversial possibilities: elephant tusks or shark body parts. After all, the shock-factor items which turn up on the luggage carousel at Heathrow must come from somewhere.

I was not prepared for the reality: stall after stall of fetid, decaying body parts. Our guide (it seemed you couldn’t just look round on your own, but had to pay someone to give you a tour) showed us row upon row of animal heads, still complete with skin, teeth, fur and rotting eyeballs. Cats and dogs, some of them still babies, made up the bulk of the wares on offer, but mingled in were things like shark jaws, dried lizards and snake skins. One man tried to sell me an entire string of boa constrictor spine bones. At this point however, shopping was the last thing on my mind. The whole place reeked of death and rot, and I was desperate not to so much as touch anything, let alone pop it into my hand-luggage and wrap it for Christmas. It didn’t help that rain was on the way. The sky was dark and heavy, and all the stalls were shrouded in tarpaulins to keep the water out. The vendors would beckon us over and then peel back the plastic to surprise us with another eyeful of corpses. At the far side of the marketplace a scraggy (live) baboon was chained to a tree looking hungry.

It was one of those moments - they are few, but always very strong - when I couldn’t simply put the whole thing down to ‘cultural difference’ and enjoy the ride. No amount of open-mindedness could compensate for the physical revulsion which kicked in and left me feeling uncharacteristically keen to get the whole experience over and done with. For most of the tour I just wanted to gag.

In spite of the shock of it all, there was still something about the experience which made me glad we’d gone along with it. It was quite interesting to be shown into a back room to meet the local Voodoo chief. He conducted a ceremony of blessing, didn’t mind too much when we didn’t buy his crusty lucky charms, and let us take all the photos we wanted. About ten minutes, and half a bottle of hand sanitizer later, I had got over the weird feeling and was able to be more circumspect. After all, if you want to see the traditional way of life as it really is, you can’t complain when the reality turns out to be unpalatable. This was a real fetish market, serving a very real clientele (the vendors couldn’t possibly have survived solely on the trickle of tourists paying to take photos) so you got what you asked for. If I’d been looking for animal-friendly souvenirs, I should have gone to the Marwell Zoo gift shop instead.

Anyway, it may not surprise you to know that T Shirt Man was still hanging around. We told him he could go, planning to get another taxi when we’d finished at the market, but he was positively indignant - he was happy to wait - take as long as you want, he said - it’s no extra charge. “C’est un faveur” he insisted. Three times we checked with him, and three times he said the price was still 3000CFAs - the price he had originally quoted. Akima mentioned that a friend of hers had managed to get to the market for just 1000CFAs, so we just assumed that he wouldn’t have waited if it wasn’t still worth his while.

Of course, when he dropped us at out hotel the price suddenly soared. He demanded 7000CFAs - a completely ludicrous sum of money, even including the wait. Now, taxis drivers renegotiating at the last minute is nothing new. It happens in Ghana quite often, but usually you just insist on sticking to the price agreed originally, and the taxi driver grudgingly accepts it. Sometimes, if the journey really has been longer than expected, you throw in something extra. I was angry with the guy for lying to us repeatedly about what he was going to charge us, but it didn’t change the fact that he had driven us around for a long time, so we offered him 5000CFAs. By this time Akima and I were coming up with phrases that definitely aren’t on the French GCSE syllabus. “Qui est la voleur maintenant?” I remember saying furiously. He went through an elaborate pretence of saying he didn’t want our money if that’s what we were offering, and drove off, but then he turned round and came back. He marched into the hotel reception, claiming that we were refusing to pay him. After a lot of shouting, which didn’t make the receptionist very happy, we explained to her what had happened, and she reassured us that 5000CFAs ought to be more than enough money for the journey we had taken. We checked in (with the taxi driver still hanging around creepily), slapped the money down on the front desk and told him he could take it or leave it. He took it and stormed off.

This had all been rather stressful, so even though the hotel would normally have been way out of our budget, we decided that we would rather be somewhere safe and central than risk taking more dodgy taxis out to Togoville, where we knew there was a cheaper option. All of us had felt much less secure the minute we crossed the border, and the horrible shouty T Shirt Man had not helped. The plus side was that the room we were shown into was extremely nice - a little bungalow apartment with a sitting area and the first hot shower I had seen since leaving the UK! However, we had barely dumped our bags when there was a knock at the door. Assuming I to be the receptionist returning, I opened it, and had the shock of my life when I realised it was the taxi driver. Before I could tell him to get out, he had barged into the room, shouting furiously in French.

All at once everyone was shouting. I told him to get the **** out of our room (my French being suddenly replaced by the kind of ‘French’ you try to avoid in front of your grandmother) and Angela and Akima, hearing voices in the next door room came and joined in. Akima, who had lived for two years in Paris, and whose grasp of real French had not yet deserted her, gave the man a proper run for his money, telling him how disgusted she was that he should come in and threaten a room full of girls. He just ignored her and shouted things like “Je vais vous brutaliser”. Meanwhile I went to see if there was another exit we could use. All the other doors were locked, so they only way out was to get past him. To make matters worse, there was no phone to ring reception and none of us had any signal on our mobiles. I decided it was time to try out the exciting rape alarm which I had bought especially for my trip to Ghana.

Now, let me be clear, I did not expect that at the sound of a loud noise the man would run in fear, but I did think it might attract attention - alerting the hotel staff or one of the other (preferably male) guests. This was wishful thinking. I pulled out the pin, setting off the most ear piercing noise you can imagine, but the man didn’t even blink, let alone look bothered. The alarm shrilled away, but nobody looked in to see what was going on. In fact, the alarm seemed to have made things worse. Everybody had to shout even louder to be heard over the noise, and I couldn’t hear myself think. Meanwhile the man just stared at us with the scary popping eyes of someone who’s really irate. Rather sheepishly I put the pin back in the rape alarm and made a mental note to write to the company and tell them to bump up the maximum volume of those things. So much for that.

Anyway, by now I was seriously beginning to panic - screaming at him to get out. I went to go past him and he let me through, so I was out onto the lawn, but he didn’t follow. The others couldn’t come out because that would mean leaving the man in our room with all our bags and money, so once again I was forced to admit defeat. I went back in so that we could all stick together. On the way I was able to get my hands on the key, which was still on the outside of the door. Then I did the stupidest thing. I was genuinely panicked, and seeing the man barely a foot from the doorstep, I tried to close the door on him with a shove. This was both an optimistic thing to try, and a big mistake because it made him angrier. There was a horrible moment when I realised how much weaker I was than him. He stormed up right in my face and shouted words to the effect of “so you want to use force? We can use force if you want to”, at which point I just disappeared round the corner and burst into tears. All in all, a fantastically useless performance when staying calm would have probably been much more effective.

Thankfully Akima kept her cool, telling him how shocked she was at his behaviour and remaining unfazed by his rather interesting threats to call the police. She reminded him that he was the one who had barged into our room uninvited, and threatened to call the police herself (a bold bit of bluff-calling since none of our phones were working!)

At last he gave up. I don’t actually think he was ever planning to get violent, he just wanted to see how much money he could get out of us with intimidation. Later we told the receptionist what had happened and she said that kind of thing happened all the time in Togo. Ghanaian taxi drivers negotiate; Togolese ones, apparently, don’t. T Shirt Man said he would give us three days and then he would come back for his money (which suited us just fine, seeing as we were only there one night). However, it took a long time to calm down. We locked the doors and windows, sat down on the bed and tried to get our heads round the whole thing. I apologised for my uselessness and we even managed a weak laugh about the complete ineffectiveness of the rape alarm. At that stage we didn’t even know if he’d actually gone away. We emerged about an hour later and were relieved to find that he seemed to have gone for good. The hotel moved us to a different room, and we had a word with the security guards, giving them a quick preview of the rape alarm’s noise and asking them to make sure the man wasn’t allowed back on the premises.

I think the only bit of it that’s really hard to explain, is why we didn’t just give him the extra 2000CFAs. Even we found it hard to rationalise afterwards. I think we just had this feeling that it might still not be the end of it. He hadn’t ever gone beyond shouting, bit it felt as though he was prepared to intimidate us for as much as he could get out of us. If we gave in, he might just get even more demanding. In any case, the last thing we wanted to do was go rooting around in our wallets with him watching. He might see what we had on us and decide to do something even more drastic. It may sound stupid as you read this, but we just did what felt like the best plan at the time.

Anyway, the rest of the weekend passed fairly uneventfully (in fact, very uneventfully because we ended up blowing all our CFAs on the room and ran out of money!) We did get chatting to some really nice people working at the hotel. It was a really sobering conversation. We asked them what it was like to be in Togo, and they said it was like living in a place where a funeral was going on. Had they tried to protest against the dictator, Akima asked? What if all students like them got together and led a demonstration? Donovan, the most talkative of them, shook his head. They’d tried that a few years ago and friends of his had been gunned down in the street. It was a moment I will never forget. You know those people who say that democracy isn’t necessarily the right answer? Those who say it’s something Western idealists are always too keen to impose on countries who might be quite happy with the way things are? Well at that moment I decided that such people are idiots. Democracy may not be perfect, but if you don’t have it, you have no control over your own life. You have no hope of change. We were talking to people who had despaired of ever seeing prosperity and stability, even though it was happening just next door.

The following morning, having spent all but a handful of our CFAs, we were forced to skip breakfast and head back to the border. I have to say I was very much looking forward to being back on familiar territory (and pretty keen to be somewhere where I had the correct currency to buy something to eat!) However, a nice little thing happened which rescued the weekend from being a disaster. As we reached the border we were told that the Togolese football team (including England Premier League star Adebayor) were about to return from a 6-0 victory over Swaziland in a match held in Accra. A big crowd had gathered, with everyone dressed yellow, red and green capes and T shirts. A brass band arrived on an open-bed truck, and Adebayor’s Mum even showed up! Everyone was singing and dancing, and the whole thing was all the more exciting because it wasn’t in any way put on for the tourists.

We swallowed our hunger pangs and stuck around to see them arrive in a big coach painted with the Togolese flag. Adebayor got out of the bus to greet people and Akima got a great close up which she said her boyfriend would be very jealous of! Of course, while all this was going on, the Togolese immigration officials were getting out their cameras to take photos, and I saw about ten people just squeeze through a gap in the fence and run into Ghana whilst the officers were looking away - dropping their bundles and waving goodbye to their friends!

As we signed our entry cards to Ghana, a man came up to us and asked us if we needed any help…. I don’t think he could understand why we were so quick to say no!

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