I was on a mission to find a nice beach. (The one alongside the capital, Lomé, is a depository for the cities raw sewage). Eventually my search took me to Agbodrafo, a strange seemingly empty little coastal town. On the shoreline I saw asphalt flaking away as the old beach-side road was gradually being consumed by the sea (they are now on the 4th parallel road, each moving more inland than the last, due to sea level rise and poor construction). Walked along and saw school children loading up basins filled with sand to carry on their heads back to wherever they came from. Women along the beach sifted through large piles separating the shells, black stones, and lighter colored stones. A little farther along a large group of people was gathered and as I got closer it looked like a village market steeped in sand and sedated by the sea breeze. The only movement I saw was a long thick rope with more than a dozen people strapped in by the wrists shuffling backward to the syncopated beat of their cowbell playing cheerleader. They were hauling in a large net of fish. After 10 minutes they took a break. A man said it would be more than 3 hours before it’d be all the way in to shore. During each break the rope was moved a few yards to the left, mirroring the long shore current that continually pressed the net further down the coast. As the net passed over their heads, the women with their pots of beans and rice and merchandise shifted one by one down the coast too.
Continuing on down the beach I came across an immense wall, maybe a mile long, unbroken and guarded. I learned from a passer by that it was the compound of the “barons” of the phosphate mines. (Phosphate, used in cement, is the only natural resource in Togo with enough value to be extracted and exported). Past the carefully concealed mansions of the barons I witnessed the enormous phosphate processing plant encased in flaking tin spewing some sort of yellow muck straight into the crashing waves. Yellow crests peaked and fell until they finally dissolved back to blue.
Quite a day at the beach.
