Britain and France partition Togoland

On 31 August 1914, according to an old British chronology of the war, Britain and France concluded an agreement establishing provisional occupation zones in conquered German Togoland. The colony had capitulated only a few days earlier, on 26 August.

Division by the positions of the troops

Preliminary arrangements had already been made on 27 August at Atakpamé. The commanders of the allied detachments, the British Lieutenant-Colonel Frederick Bryant and the French Major Maroix, decided that each side would take over the administration of the territory occupied by its troops. The agreement was then confirmed in Lomé on behalf of the authorities of the British Gold Coast and French Dahomey. Sources give the date of this document as 30 or 31 August. At the beginning of September it was approved by the governments in London and Paris.

The division clearly favoured the British. They received the colony’s capital, Lomé, with its wharf, to which all three of Togoland’s railway lines ran, as well as the fertile area around Kpalimé with its cocoa and coffee plantations. The French got the extensive but poorer territories in the east and north, with Aného, Atakpamé, Sokodé and Mango. According to French historians, Paris, absorbed by the dramatic situation on the Western Front, attached little importance to these negotiations at the time.

From provisional division to two states

France soon came to regard this division as unfair. In December 1916 the zones were turned into separate administrations, and in July 1919 a new border was agreed in London. This time the French received the larger part of the colony, about 60 per cent, together with Lomé, the coast and the railway. The British were left with a narrower, more sparsely populated strip in the west.

In 1922 both areas became mandated territories of the League of Nations: British Togoland and French Togoland. After the Second World War they were turned into UN trust territories. In 1956 the inhabitants of the British part voted in a plebiscite for union with the Gold Coast, and in 1957 they became part of independent Ghana. The French part gained independence in 1960 as the Republic of Togo. The border drawn after the First World War cut across the lands of the Ewe people, who to this day live on both sides of it.