Togo

The Ewe-speaking people of West Africa named a lagoon-side settlement using two words: to, meaning water or lagoon, and go, meaning on the bank of or at the edge of. The resulting compound, togo, meant simply where the water meets the shore. The settlement sat on the northern bank of a brackish lagoon that buffered the Atlantic coast, and the name fit the landscape with geographic precision.

In July 1884, the German envoy Gustav Nachtigal signed a protectorate treaty with the local chief Mlapa III at Togoville, the settlement on Lake Togo's northern shore. Germany named its new territory Togoland, appending its own suffix to the Ewe place name. Togoland covered a narrow coastal strip that would split, after Germany's defeat in World War I, into British and French mandates.

The League of Nations partitioned Togoland in 1922. The western portion became British Togoland and merged with Ghana after a 1956 plebiscite. The eastern portion, French Togoland, became the independent Republic of Togo on April 27, 1960, keeping the German colonial name but carrying an Ewe root that predated any European presence on the coast.

Togo remains one of the narrowest countries in Africa, barely 56 kilometers wide at its thinnest point. The lagoon at its name's origin still exists: Lake Togo runs along the southeastern coast, its brackish water meeting Atlantic swells at a sandbar a few meters wide. Fishermen work it today much as they did in the nineteenth century, navigating the same water that gave a country its name.