Lake Togo handed its name to an entire country. On 5 July 1884 the German explorer Gustav Nachtigal signed a treaty on its far shore with Mlapa III, chief of the lakeside village of Togoville, and the protectorate he declared became German Togoland; the republic still carries the village's name, and the village carries the lagoon's. The water is brackish and startlingly shallow, roughly a metre deep on average, some fifteen kilometres long and six across, held off the Atlantic by a sandbar barely a kilometre wide and draining east through the channel at Aného. Aného was the colony's first capital from 1885, until the Germans moved the administration on and settled at Lomé in 1897.
Dugouts still cross from Agbodrafo, and the boatmen stand and pole them along rather than paddle, because in most of the lagoon the bottom is only a pole's length down. Coming towards Togoville you see its church spires first, raised by the Germans in 1910, and vodun shrines stand in the lanes behind the church. On the ocean side, the work happens on the beach itself. Twenty or thirty people take hold of one rope and walk a hand-woven seine in from the surf, an hour of hauling for a single shared catch, and the nets come up fullest between July and September when cold water rises off this coast. Late in the year, turtles crawl the same sand after dark to nest. That sand nearly went: the sea was taking five to twelve metres of shore a year here, and it swallowed the town's football pitch. New groynes and a rebuilt dune have stopped the retreat, the beach is wide again, and the football pitch is back.