Lake Togo is a shallow brackish lagoon behind the Atlantic sandbar of southern Togo, and the village on its far shore gave the country its name. Dugouts push off from Agbodrafo and are poled, not paddled, across water rarely deeper than your chest. The far bank comes up slowly, twin spires first, and you land at Togoville, where the treaty that named the country was signed in 1884. Those spires belong to a church built after villagers said they had seen the Virgin standing over the lake in 1971. A shrine went up on the waterfront two years later, and a pope came to pray at it in 1985. The lanes behind it hold vodun shrines, the town is split about evenly, and a good many families quietly keep both.
At dawn on the ocean beach twenty or thirty people take hold of one rope: fishermen, wives, children, whoever is on the sand. They walk a hand-woven seine in from the surf, an hour's work, and the catch is divided where it lands. Nobody will mind if you pull. Out on the lagoon the rhythm is the opposite: one man wades into the shallows and throws a circular net, drawing it shut in one motion, dozens of times for a dinner's worth of fish. The sandbar between the two waters narrows to about a kilometre, coconut palms leaning over surf on one side and flat lagoon on the other, with men mending nets in the shade. A low white house at Agbodrafo holds the hardest thing here: a cellar under its floorboards, too low to stand up in, where captives were kept before being taken down to the sea. You get into it the way they did, dropping through an opening in the floor, because there are no stairs. Every September, at Glidji just north, priests carry a stone out of a sacred forest and read its colour aloud as the omen for the year ahead. White or blue means peace and good rain, red conflict, black famine, and government ministers stand in the crowd waiting for the verdict like everyone else.