Their legacy remains visible throughout Assigamé. Generations later, fabric still moves through the market in towering stacks and colorful displays, carrying forward a trade that helped shape both the city’ s economy and its identity.
UNDERSTANDING VODUN
Elsewhere in Lomé, another longstanding tradition remains part of contemporary life. At Akodessawa Fetish Market, tables hold animal skulls and bones, dried chameleons, herbs, carved figures, talismans, and other objects associated with traditional spiritual practices.
Lomé
Credit: Gloria Castro
For those unfamiliar with Vodun, the displays can be difficult to interpret without context. Akodessawa is not simply a curiosity or spectacle. It is a functioning marketplace connected to a centuriesold West African spiritual tradition deeply rooted in Togo and neighboring Benin. Practitioners come here seeking materials used in rituals associated with healing, protection, divination, and communication with the spiritual world. In that context, the market offers a window into a belief system that has endured across generations and continues to occupy a place in Togolese culture.
WHERE THE CITY MEETS THE SEA
Follow Lomé south and eventually the streets give way to sand. Along the Gulf of Guinea, wooden fishing boats line the shoreline as crews work the surf, haul nets onto the beach and sort the day’ s catch. The scene is part of a rhythm that has played out here for generations, linking the capital to the Atlantic at its doorstep.
The ocean is more than a backdrop. Fishing supports livelihoods and communities along the coast, while the shoreline itself provides an open counterpoint to the movement of the city just beyond it. Lomé’ s relationship with the water also extends east toward Lake Togo and the communities that have developed along its shores.
ACROSS THE WATER
Travel east from Lomé and the landscape begins to shift. Reaching Togoville involves crossing Lake Togo aboard a traditional wooden pirogue, the slim boats that have long transported people and goods across the region’ s waterways.
On the opposite shore, Togoville provides another perspective on the traditions encountered back in the capital. Vodun and Christianity have long coexisted here. Sacred Vodun sites and shrines share the community with a prominent Catholic cathedral built during German colonial rule, reflecting different chapters of Togolese spiritual and colonial history.
The journey begins before reaching shore. As the pirogue moves across the lake, Lomé’ s traffic and crowded markets recede behind you. What remains is water, shoreline, and a connection between communities that predates the modern capital. And perhaps that is the most revealing way to experience Lomé itself.
The city’ s story extends beyond just one landmark. It is evident in everyday scenes that have persisted through generations: women selling fabric in Assigamé, practitioners collecting materials in Akodessawa, fishing crews bringing boats onto the shore, and pirogues sailing across the water.
GETTING THERE
Ethiopian Airlines offers nonstop flights from Washington Dulles International Airport( IAD) to Lomé, Togo’ s Lomé – Tokoin International Airport, also known as Gnassingbé Eyadéma International Airport( LFW), between two to four times a week.
There is no single journey that can define Africa. Every border crossed introduces another history, landscape and way of life, and every conversation complicates whatever picture you arrived with. That may be the greatest reward of traveling across the continent: realizing how much more there is to discover. From Washington, nonstop flights provide a starting point. Where the journey goes from there— through crowded markets, quiet coastlines, mountain communities, creative neighborhoods and conversations with the people who call these places home— is what turns a destination on a map into something far more memorable.
AUTUMN / WINTER 2026 23 FLYWASHINGTON. COM