Anglo-French agreement on Togoland

On 27 December 1916 the governments of Britain and France concluded an agreement on the provisional administration of conquered German Togoland. This date is given consistently by the old British war chronology, which also lists the agreement among Anglo-French treaties, and by modern studies. According to them, on that day the colony was divided into two separate zones, British and French. The text of the agreement itself, however, is rarely discussed in the literature, and its details are known mainly from the way the two parts of the country were subsequently governed.

Togoland had capitulated as early as 26 August 1914, after less than three weeks of fighting. A few days later the commanders and governors of the neighbouring colonies, the British Gold Coast and French Dahomey, divided the country into zones of occupation according to where their troops stood. The British took the western part of the colony, with the capital Lomé and all three railway lines, and the French the eastern and northern parts. This was meant to be an arrangement for the duration of the war, pending a final settlement after peace was concluded. The governments in London and Paris accepted it unchanged.

For two years both zones formally remained under military occupation, although in practice it was an occupation in name only. According to the British publication The Empire at War, in the British zone a single company of soldiers from the Gold Coast or Sierra Leone was enough for a garrison. The administration was run by officials from the Gold Coast. The German poll tax and forced labour for private employers were abolished. The Gold Coast annual report for 1916 stated that the British zone was self-supporting and that the area under cultivation had grown by a third. German merchants were at first left in peace, but in 1916 they were deported, and in 1916–1917 so were German missionaries.

The December agreement turned the provisional zones of occupation into two separate administrative areas. The boundary between them broadly followed the line of 1914. Lomé remained in British hands. According to modern studies, the boundary cut across the former German districts and tribal divisions without regard to them. Lists of colonial administrators state that from 27 December 1916 the western part of the country was governed directly by the governors of the Gold Coast. The larger, eastern part of the country was administered by a French commissioner. A similar solution had been adopted earlier in Kamerun, which the British and French had provisionally partitioned in March 1916.

In Togoland, too, the division was to apply only until the end of the war. The French regarded it as unfavourable from the start, because the British had received Lomé, the railways and the fertile area around Kpalimé with its cocoa plantations. In 1919 a new boundary, more favourable to France, was agreed in London. Lomé passed under French rule on 1 October 1920, and in 1922 both parts became mandated territories of the League of Nations: British Togoland and French Togoland.