Page:Africa by Élisée Reclus, Volume 3.djvu/322

 increased the range of commercial enterprise, and the Mina town of Adanghe, 30 miles from the coast, will probably soon lose its independence. Some 60 miles farther north lies the still more important city of Atakpameh, whose inhabitants have valiantly and successfully defended their freedom from the attacks of the king of Dahomey. In Togo the chief crops are maize and ground-nuts, and of the whole area about one-twentieth is under cultivation.

Togo, the capital, comprises five villages standing close together in a forest of cocoa-nut palms on the north side of the chief lagoon. Bé, the fetish town of the Togo natives, lies much farther west, near the British frontier, and within 2 miles of the coast. The neighbouring village of Biassé is inhabited chiefly by manufacturers of fetishes and earthenware. Somé, the chief market in Togo, is quite a

new place recently founded on the coast close to the English possessions. On the same coast, but farther west, are Bagida (the Bagdad of some maps), and Porto Seguro, which was founded by immigrants from Brazil, and which had some importance before the abolition of the slave trade in 1863.

The kingdom of Little Popo, east of Togo, was till lately a French protectorate, but has recently been transferred to Germany in exchange for some places on the South Senegambian coast. Povo, as it is called by the Germans, consists, like Togo, of two distinct zones, the seaboard on which are situated the trading places, and the almost unknown but much better cultivated region beyond the lagoons.