With malaria breathing on my back and no rush to go anywhere, I stayed one more day in Lomé. I woke up with all symptoms gone after a 10 hour sleep.
And I ran out of internet. It’s expensive here, 1000cfa is just 450MB valid for 3 days. I used it in a day, yepp. So I recharged my account, bought two very dry sweetish cakes as for breakfast for 200cfa and lied a little bit longer in my sweet cool room.
I went to the post office, La Grande Poste, 300cfa for a zemidjan. Outside the post office a man was selling postcards, all of them burnt out by the sun and thus expensive at 500cfa. I bought some artsy ones nevertheless and posted them. Stamps are 600cfa to Europe. There was a sticker showing time of delivery of mail to some countries. Gabon strangely has the shortest time, 2 days for regular post and 3 (!) days for EMS, that’s courier. France at 6 days of regular post delivery has longer time than Switzerland (5) but EMS takes only 2 days.
As I posted the cards and wanted to take a photo of the mailbox I told the man sitting next to it he will feature on the photo. He didn’t react but after the photo he demanded money. Of course.
Right in front of the post office there were women making sandwiches and fresh juice. The sandwich was with avocado – finally someone came up with this idea – and other onions. It was good but I’d add more vinaigrette. 300cfa. The juice was lemon and orange and it was delicious, but it was diluted with water and heavy sugar was added. 200cfa. I ate sandwich opposite a man wearing what seemed like a feminist/equal rights shirt. I said to him I liked it twice, he ignored me. Or maybe he didn’t hear me. The words on the left are “Togolese woman, a fighting woman”.
As I was around all things paper I thought I could print out my Benin visa. I found a shop that printed but of course they had no internet. The boss of the shop was a dreadlocked woman and she refused to receive an email from me on her phone – everyone wants to print directly from my phone connecting it via cable to a laptop but my phone has USB-C socket which here is yet unknown – instead telling me use Xender which is an app I don’t have. But then – enlightenment – I could use Bluetooth to send the file to her phone. So we did print it.
From there I walked down the street to Grand Marché.
Togo is a small country but it seems to me as if it’s well punching above its weight. The local fetish market is apparently famous across the continent. Ethiopian Airlines bases its West African subsidiary – Asky – in Lomé. And the best waxed cotton is being traded here.
So I hoped I will take some pics of the shops run by women known as Mama Benz, from the cars they are driven in. But the materials are hidden from the sun, in the shadow, so all in all, even though the market is grand and interesting, it’s not that easy to snap the colours of Lomé materials. Moreover, someone had a telephone fétiche around me and some of the nicest pics, including a Muslim woman splendidly dressed in orange, came out unfocused.
I
managed to change euros, I wanted to do it at a bank but a money changer called me on the street and we did it in his shop. 655cfa to a euro. And then later on I saw more money changers and all of them were Nigerians. So I did ask about dollar to naira exchange rate – there used to be very good black market trade in dollars and later even better in euros or pounds – but they were giving me 340 naira to a dollar. One managed to climb up to 355 which might not be bad. There is a very good website for all your Nigerian exchange rate needs, abokiFX.
As I was walking around the market I saw… No way. Coffee! The menu said “café exp. 200CFA” and I saw small cups and I saw a dripping filter machine and even though this ain’t real espresso or an Italian coffeemaker I did ask for a cup. The man said it’s not hot but if I had time he could prepare a fresh one. And I did have time and he did burn charcoal – not sure what the filter drop machine was doing there – and it seemed to me he just put a pot of water on it and a few minutes later I had a cup of good thick black coffee with me. Ah the day was great. Of course I did ask where to buy it and it’s in the supermarket.
So I did find two supermarkets but one of them was half-empty in general, the other one had only ground coffee, and not cheap, 1350cfa for 250g. It’s coffee from Central West Togo, a town of Kpalimé.
Next to the two supermarkets there was a shop that had some wood carvings put out in front. They didn’t look particularly exciting but I did enter.
Inside, another story. Masks and plenty of Nok pottery. There was a price on one mask, 350,000cfa. €534. Oh dear. The mask next to it was turned towards the window, the shopkeeper turned it towards me, it was beautiful but wild. And it was from Nigeria, it said Ijo. Now after Google research I know it’s Ijo as im Ijaw, in Niger Delta. Oh well. Niger Delta is off limits until Shell stops fucking the people’s livelihoods up so I can only hold the memory of the masks in a Lomé gallery.
Back to the mask that was turned around to face me instead of the window, I asked for the price and the man looked at a number stuck on the bottom of its stand and searches it… in his pricebook. He didn’t even said the price, just pointed it to me. 1,200,000cfa. €1830. $2050. 7850zł. Oh yeah.
He said he had mainly masks from Nigeria, Burkina and Mali. The Nigerian masks were particularly interesting but maybe because I haven’t seen many of them in my life. The National Museum in Lagos is tiny and the tourist markets in Nigeria don’t have such. And I pointed it to a man but his answer was that in Nigeria such things are going to museums not for sale. Yeah right, which museums? Are we talking about the same Nigeria? The Nigeria where they found $43million in cash in Lagos apartment belonging to the spy chief?
Anyway as I looked at the Nok collection, I noticed that each piece, some of them just corpse, no head no limbs, has a laminated piece of paper attached. The shopkeeper said the gallery sends each piece to a laboratory in Marseille to get it verified and dated. And the papers attached are the copies of the lab certificate explaining the method of dating and probability of age. And the piece I was looking at was “2000-2600 years old.” Gasp! Of course I had to ask about the price. The pricebook said 12000000 CFA. I just enjoyed typing the zeroes. 15million. That’s €22,000 for you.
Of course no photos were allowed. I did ask the man which is the most expensive piece in the shop but he wouldn’t/couldn’t tell. We possibly found out a few moments later.
I looked around and on one other piece of the pottery I saw it was “3000-3800 years old”. And there was a particularly beautiful piece of the pottery, a complete head, only “2000-2400 years old”. Not wanting to bother the shopkeeper any further – I couldn’t buy anything here even if I wanted – I told him I have 2 price questions. He consulted the pricebook for the 3000-years-old piece: 18million. I’ll let you do the currency conversion yourselves. And then I asked for the head’s price and he without looking into his pricebook said the price. I asked how he knew the price of this one without the book, he answered that he knew I’d ask the price of the head so he looked it up beforehand. 20million CFA. €30,000. 130,000zł. Now that in a shop at the edge of a market where sachets of water are sold for 25cfa each, or sacks of potatoes are sold for 100cfa. Mangoes! Dry fish! Onions! Second-hand clothes! Waxed materials! Nok pottery!
After the mask shop I walked on and saw a small supermarket. Inside there was coffee in coffee beans. This mission was easy. I bought 2 packs of 250g for 1000cfa each. That’s double the price of Ivorian coffee but food seems here more expensive than there.
I took zemidjan back to the guesthouse for 300cfa and for 200cfa I was taken to where cars towards Benin leave – I was going to Aného. It is supposed to be an old colonial town but from what I remember from my 2010 trip there was nothing there. Anyhow, I went. It’s 1000cfa in 2+4 passenger configuration or 1,500cfa for 1+3 configuration if police is particularly insisting on such but then front seat is 2,000cfa. We went for 1,000cfa per person, a man possibly taller than me, with his crutches, was sharing the front seat with another man.
Aného is a few kilometres from Benin border, 45kms from Lomé. I walked on an empty gorgeously looking beach. Water was blue, palms grew by the sand, the fishermen were sleeping in their shadow. People were curious about me, stopping me for questions. A woman was drying tiny fish on the remains of the asphalt on the road running along the beach. A white man passed me on a mountain bike. In this heat. There was nothing colonial.
I turned around and saw a church tower. This could have been my colonial remnant. And it was but nothing special. However around the corner, on the other side of the road there was a market, Monday is Aného’s market day. I didn’t pay much attention to it until I walked towards what seemed another colonial ruin but then I saw the féticheurs. Ah and they were quite talkative. First they wanted me to buy a dried chameleon. Then one of them offered a live turtle. It’s interesting that it was live as most of the animals on display were dead: birds, heads of monkeys and cats. One of them wanted to sell me a telephone fetish. It was a small stick with a hole into which another stick, shorter but spiky could be. Both sticks were tied together. I asked what I was supposed to do with the fetish, the man I should just carry it. But he didn’t quite explain what the fetish would do. Would it allow me to snap photos without limits? Now I think I should have bought it. Anyway, the man insisted it’s not gris-gris. When I did ask what’s the difference he did not say. When I did ask if the fetish or gris-gris somehow relate to juju that’s in Nigeria he did not know what juju is. He insisted neither the fetish not gris gris have anything to do with voodoo. As for me, I understand fetish is a like an idol that has to be pleased to work. Would I have to be killing chickens to please my telephone fetish? Gris gris on the other hand is a charm that helps/protects/hurts someone. Both come from animist beliefs but I think gris gris has also been adopted by islamic bush wizards.
When I didn’t buy the fetish the féticheur still asked for a cadeau, a gift.
The ruined building next to the féticheurs wasn’t anything special, I went into the market.
It was very interesting especially the food part. Clothes, second hand of course, look like they are piles of trash, they lie in such a mess. Food is on the other hand somehow presentable. I was snapping secret photos and I think some men realised what I was doing and I heard some comments but I didn’t pay attention. There were more féticheurs in the market and I managed to snap a bit, though one of them was equipped with a anti-photo fétiche and asked me not to take pics. I noticed some women had very funny haircuts.
Back on the main road I felt hungry. There was an inviting bar-restaurant sign painted on a building but inside there were two women lying on the ground and no food. In a nearby alcohol shop I took two small bottles of bissap, it wasn’t too sugary.
A car back to Lomé soon passed by and by the sunset I was back in town. I decided to walk a bit. They sell bottles of groundnuts in Lomé but they are in range of 1500-2000cfa. In Ivory Coast they were 1000cfa and in Nigeria I remember they were N600 and that’s 1000cfa. So I bought two small bags of groundnuts, maybe that’s better, I’d finish a bottle in an evening and ordered a lemon-orange juice. It cost 300cfa and the woman insisted I had to come and buy more juice tomorrow before I leave.
I walked on and saw a maquis. Prices of Lomé level, of fish they only had tilapia, I ordered salad and two gizzard kebabs . It was pleasant seating outside but the kebabs arrived cold and salad had pasta inside. 1900cfa with big water bottle which I finished onsite, I still felt hungry. Further down the road there was a Lebanese fast food but if seemed to deal with hamburgers only and a Lebanese bar/restaurant. It had shawarma. I was looking forward to shawarma, it was 1000cfa and it wasn’t spectacular. The best shawarma around – though it’s quite far from original recipe – is in Lagos.
After shawarma I entered a supermarket and decided to indulge myself with a pack of biscuits. But it was a French supermarket, Champion, so everything inside was French with French prices. I managed to find a pack of tartelettes for 800cfa. Still, Turkish biskrem rulez.
From the supermarket I went back to guesthouse.
Coming back to Maman 