Lake Togo is a shallow brackish lagoon behind the Atlantic sandbar of southern Togo, in the Maritime Region east of Lomé, crossed by boatmen poling standing up in dugouts from the shore village of Agbodrafo to Togoville, the village on the far shore that gave its name to the whole country, and it ends to the east at the old port of Aného and the mangrove creeks of the Mono delta. The lagoon is rarely deeper than the chest, and the pirogues are poled rather than paddled across it, past fishermen setting traps in the reeds, to Togoville, where the German colonisers signed the treaty of 1884 that made the country their protectorate and where a cathedral stands because in 1971 the villagers said they saw the Virgin standing over the water; the village is also a centre of voodoo, with the shrines and the fetish market on the shore. On the sandbar between the lagoon and the ocean, which narrows to about a kilometre with coconut palms leaning over both shores at once, a low white house at Agbodrafo hides a cellar beneath its floorboards too low to stand in, where captives were held before being taken down to the sea.
At dawn on the beach at Aného twenty or thirty people, fishermen, wives, children, whoever is there, take hold of one rope and walk a hand-woven seine in from the surf, heaviest from July to September when the cold water wells up and the sardinella shoal into the shallows, and anyone may take a place on the rope. East of the town the lagoon frays into red-rooted mangrove channels, part of the biosphere reserve that Togo shares with Benin, and every September at Glidji nearby the priests carry a sacred stone out of the forest and read its colour aloud as the omen for the year. Olive ridley and leatherback turtles crawl up the sandbar after dark from November to January. Lake Togo is a lagoon that named a nation, and the boatmen still cross it standing up.