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Concept
Lomé
Summary
Lomé (UKˈloʊmeɪ , USloʊˈmeɪ ) is the capital and largest city of Togo. It has an urban population of 837,437 while there were 1,477,660 permanent residents in its metropolitan area as of the 2010 census. Located on the Gulf of Guinea at the southwest corner of the country, with its entire western border along the easternmost point of Ghana's Volta Region, Lomé is the country's administrative and industrial center, which includes an oil refinery. It is also the country's chief port, from where it exports coffee, cocoa, copra, and oil palm kernels.
Its city limits extends to the border with Ghana, located a few hundred meters west of the city center, to the Ghanaian city of Aflao and the South Ketu district where the city is situated, had 160,756 inhabitants in 2010. The cross-border agglomeration of which Lomé is the centre, has about 2 million inhabitants as of 2020.
unreferenced section
The name 'Lomé' comes from Alo(ti)mé or (shorter) Alomé, which in the Ewe language, literally, means "in the alo trees", or "within the alo trees", to designate simply the forest of alo.
For the record, Alo-ti or alo is a tree whose wood is being used by native people and is today produced also in factories, to make small logs very popular that are used as traditional toothpicks, especially in Lomé and the south of the country.
Timeline of Lomé
The city was founded by the Ewes and thereafter in the 19th century by German, British and African traders, becoming the capital of Togoland in 1897. At the end of the nineteenth century, British customs duties on imported products (especially on alcohol and tobacco) weighed very heavily. The traders (mainly maritime Ewe or Anlo from the area between Aflao and Keta in the east of the British colony of Gold Coast) then looking for an alternative, a place to unload goods while being out of reach of British customs officers, naturally targeted the coastal site of Lomé, nearby. This commercial dynamic of customs circumvention and tax evasion then favored the expansion of Lomé around 1880.
Official source
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