Before 1960

It is simply impossible to talk about Togolese literature in the year when the country, as we know it today, finally gained its independence, because the land - beyond the borders invented by men - retains its roots which always spring up again, just like the name of the country, which takes its origin from an Ewe word: togodo (beyond the river bank). This language fascinated missionaries, such as Diedrich Westermann, born in Baden (Germany) in 1875 and sent to Togo where he invested himself fully in its study - publishing a dictionary in two volumes in 1905 and 1906, a grammar the following year - until he abandoned his ecclesiastical functions to become a full-time linguist and occupy the chair of African cultures at the University of Berlin. His work was fundamental in the sense that it allowed Ewe to be much more documented than many African languages. Nevertheless, he was not the first to take an interest in it, as Paul Wiegräbe (1900-1996), also a missionary in Togo from 1926 to 1939, pointed out in his book Gott spricht Ewe (God speaks Ewe). In his book Gott spricht Ewe (God Speaks Ewe), Paul Wiegräbe (1900-1996), who was also a missionary in Togo from 1926 to 1939, mentions Bernhard Schlegel (1827-1859), who was sent to Togo with a very specific aim: to translate the Bible. The most famous example is undoubtedly the difficulty in finding a correspondence for the stable where Christ was born, in a country that was devoid of them, and which was replaced by the equivalent of "where the horses sleep", animals that the missionaries had imported with them, even if they soon succumbed to the tropical climate. Anecdote aside, Ewe was reborn in writing at the time of independence, notably in the writings of Kwasi Fiawoo and Sam Obianim - both of Ghanaian nationality, although this is not really important since they are language brothers with the Togolese, and Ewe is still used today, notably in Lomé. The former signed La Cinquième Lagune in 1937, the latter Amegbetoa

in 1949. To this original heritage, we should obviously add the oral tradition, which has hardly been transcribed here but which has continued to spread, in the intimacy of the family but also in the wider cultural sphere thanks to the national festival of Griots (FESNAG) created at the beginning of the 21st century. It was not yet in Togo that the man who can be considered the first writer of the country and, more globally, one of the first African writers of French language, was born, yet it is in this country that he will spend most of his life until he becomes a civil servant of the information services after independence. Félix Couchoro was born in 1900 in Dahomey, the future Benin, and died in Lomé in 1968. As a teacher, he published novels of morality in newspapers, in serial form or not, notably in the daily Togo-Presse but also in the colonial newspaper La Dépêche africaine, which undoubtedly ensured him sufficient notoriety to see his first novel published in Paris in 1929 under the title L'Esclave. This story depicts the life of Mawalouawé, a little eight-year-old slave bought by Komlangan who will raise him as one of his own children... until, at the time of inheritance, latent rivalries and a forbidden love affair make the family explode. Couchoro was particularly prolific from the 1940s onwards, publishing some thirty works(Amour de féticheuse, Drame d'amour à Anecho, L'Héritage, cette peste, etc.) without ever winning back the French capital. Without being considered a committed writer, he dared in any case to interfere in the very sensitive breach opened between Africa and the West, which was more or less reproached to him, especially for the choice of the language he adopted. To this first literary generation, we should also add David Ananou (1917-2000) with Le Fils du fétiche, published by La Savane in 1955 and republished in 1971. Through the story of Sodji, his wives and offspring, he parodied animism or incensed Christianity, as he chose, there again the border is porous and the debate undoubtedly political..

Independence and theater

From the 1960s to the 1980s, the period opened up to many writers who continued to explore the novel, while the theater also began to impose itself. This was the generation of Yves-Emmanuel Dogbé (1939-2004), poet and essayist, who in 1979 became a publisher by founding Akpagnon, as well as that of Victor Aladji, born in 1940, who published many works, including Akossiwa mon amour in 1971 and L'Équilibriste in 1972. In the first novel, he gives the village he describes a real local color, notably by using words in Ewe, and above all he deals with the feeling of love, which was not obvious at the time. In the second, he is more critical of the post-colonial regime and imagines a sort of Togolese Robin Hood. It was also at this time that Tété-Michel Kpomassie wrote an autobiographical story with an evocative title, The African of Greenland, in which he recounts the long journey that would lead him to fulfill his dream. Prefaced by Jean Malaurie, the famous explorer and founder of the "Terre humaine" collection at Plon, this book became the first best-seller of Togo and is still available at Arthaud Editions. Finally, we should mention Pyabélo Chaold Kouly (1943-1995) who was concerned with pedagogy and education, thanks to essays, works for young people, but also a comic book scenario, the result of the adaptation of his own novel Le Missionnaire de Pessaré Kouloum, and the first of its kind in Togo. Her task was never easy and she often had to resort to self-publishing, but she undoubtedly paved the way for literature for young people as well as for female authors, notably with her novel Memories of twelve years spent in the Federal Republic of Germany

(1975) in which she tackled the issue of discrimination head-on. In the field of theater, Sénouvo Agbota Zinsou, who was born in 1946 in Lomé, was a pioneer. He co-founded his first troupe at the age of 22 and received the grand prize at the Inter-African Theatre Competition in Lagos just four years later for his play On joue la comédie, which toured internationally. He was also inspired by a genre that had developed in Ghana since the 1930s, the concert party, where musicians and characters who had nothing to envy either to vaudeville or to commedia dell'arte would perform on stage for several hours. Very popular, these plays, often performed in vernacular languages, were full of audacity. This freedom of tone, sometimes critical, worried the governments in place and was found in the texts of Zinsou who, despite the high functions he occupied (director of the National Troupe) and his numerous successes, had to go into exile, like so many others, which did not prevent him from continuing to practice his art. At least two of his works - La tortue qui chante (The Singing Turtle ) and Le Médicament (The Medicine ) - can be found in the "Monde noir" collection of the Hatier International group.

New voices

Despite these attempts at oppression, speech had definitely been liberated, as demonstrated by a new wave of writers who were more concerned with social issues. On the women's side, Lolonyo M'Baye published under the pseudonym Ami Gad Étrange héritage in 1985. Ten years later, Jeannette Ahonsou was awarded the France-Togo prize for Une longue histoire

. Twenty years later, Christiane Ekué founded the publishing house Graines de pensées. The Beninese Jean-Jacques Dabla, who lived in Togo before leaving to teach in France, signed the name Towaly for the short stories he published in which his vision of the world, sometimes disenchanted, was universal. But it is three writers - all three born between 1960 and 1966, and all three recipients of the great literary prize of Black Africa - who definitively gave Togolese literature its letters of nobility: Sami Tchak, Kossi Efoui and Kangni Alem. A doctoral student in sociology and a graduate of the Sorbonne, Sami Tchak sharpened his pen with essays inspired by his travels(La Prostitution à Cuba, L'Harmattan, 1999) before making some people cringe with a first novel that would be judged at best unclassifiable, at worst disturbing, unless it was the other way around. In Place des Fêtes (Gallimard, 2001), an incisive diatribe, an anonymous narrator, whose only information is that he is black and born in France of African parents, gives his vision of things on everything he dislikes. If everyone takes for his rank and if the whole is punctuated by some rudeness, the career of Sami Tchak was well launched and will continue including the prestigious Mercure de France(Le Paradis des puots in 2006, Filles de Mexico in 2008, Al Capone le Malien in 2011). Provocative, Kossi Efoui was also certainly, his political protest having cost him exile to France. Making his mark as a playwright, he became a rather demanding but truly fascinating novelist, as evidenced by his Cantique de l'acacia published by Seuil in 2017. Kangni Alem will also have started with the theater and marked the memories with his stagings of Bertolt Brecht or his own texts (including Chemins de croix which earned him the Tchicaya U'Tamsi prize in 1990). Since Cola cola jazz (Dapper editions, 2002), it is now for his short stories(Un rêve d'albatros, Gallimard, 2006) and for his novels(Esclaves, Lattès, 2009; Atterrissage, Graine de Pensées, 2016) that he is celebrated. To these voices is obviously added that of Théo Ananissoh, published by Gallimard, from Lisahohé in 2005 to Perdre le corps in 2021. The succession seems assured by a new generation born in the 1970s and 1980s, such as the playwright Gustave Akakpo (editions Lansman) or the novelist Edem Awumey(Port-Mélo in 2006 by Gallimard, Les Pieds sales in 2009 by Seuil, Explication de la nuit in 2014 by Du Boréal editions...).