West Africa Travel Guide
- The Anonymous Hungry Hippopotamus
- Jul 8
- 5 min read
Updated: 1 day ago
Ask most Americans to point to Togo on a map and you'll get a shrug, or a joke about a sandwich chain. Ask about Côte d'Ivoire and the odds improve slightly, mostly on account of its cocoa. Ghana, at least, tends to ring a bell. But spend real time along this stretch of the Gulf of Guinea and the borders start to feel almost arbitrary, because they are. A line drawn in a European conference room in the 1880s decided that Ghana would speak English and Togo would speak French, that one coastline would become a British colony and the next a German one and the one after that something else entirely.
The people living here didn't draw those lines. They've spent the better part of a century figuring out how to live with them anyway and building three of the most distinct, hospitable, and quietly extraordinary countries I've visited anywhere in the world. This West Africa travel guide collects everything I've written about all three countries.
Ghana
Independence Square is the size of two football fields, built to hold a million people for the day Ghana declared itself free from British rule in 1957, the first sub-Saharan African nation to do so. A few miles away, the Kwame Nkrumah Memorial Park houses the mausoleum of the man who led that independence movement, alongside photographs of him standing beside Nehru, Mao, and nearly every other twentieth-century leader who mattered. This is where Ghana's modern identity was written, and it's still legible if you know where to look.
Fort James anchors a neighborhood whose winding streets were built to help residents move unseen during the slave trade, a form of resistance built directly into the architecture. Jamestown today produces world champion boxers and spontaneous street music in equal measure, and a few miles down the coast in Teshie, artisans build coffins shaped like seven-foot Nokia phones and giant chili peppers, a funerary art form called abebuu adekai, or "proverb boxes." I went looking for history and left having also learned how a country tells its stories in color.
My instructor, Esi, taught me to hand-grind tomatoes, garlic, ginger, and onion into a paste using a mortar and pestle, then fold it into taro leaves and reconstituted pumpkin seed powder until the texture landed somewhere between scrambled eggs and tofu. Along the way I learned why palm oil, not butter or vegetable oil, is the backbone of West African cooking. It was the most fun meal I've ever helped cook, and one of the best.
A palm oil producer walked me through a process — harvest, boil, grind, press — that has barely changed in generations, running on nothing but fire, water, and labor. In Abrafo, the International Stingless Bee Centre tends hives of bees that produce a rare, citrus-tinged honey too scarce to ever be cheap. And the Adomi Bridge, historically the longest suspension bridge in the country, opened in 1957, the same year Ghana became independent, a coincidence I couldn't stop thinking about while driving across it.
Cape Coast Castle and Elmina Castle sit less than fifteen miles apart on Ghana's coast, and together they processed more enslaved Africans than almost any other point on the continent. Walking through the dungeons and out through the Door of No Return was the heaviest thing I did in the country, and it should be. If you read one post in this guide, read this one first.
Togo
Aného was once called Little Popo, and it was under that name that the Portuguese arrived in the late 15th century and began a slave trade that would eventually draw in the English, the French, the Spanish, the Dutch, the Swedes, and the Danes. Lomé, the capital, sits just across the only official border crossing between Ghana and Togo, one that took me ninety minutes to clear on the way in. This post traces both cities and the colonial partition that explains why Ghana speaks English today while Togo speaks French.
A boat across Lake Togo delivers you to Togoville, the birthplace of Vodún and the town that gave the entire country its name. From there, Lomé's Marché des Féticheurs sells the raw material of an entire spiritual tradition (animal parts, powders, charms) that most outsiders only know secondhand, through its Hollywood name. It was the strangest, most unfiltered afternoon I spent in West Africa.
Côte d'Ivoire
This wasn't a sightseeing trip. My family in Abidjan fed me for days (home-cooked meals, a Holi celebration, more hospitality than any itinerary could plan for) in a city that happens to be the third-largest French-speaking city on Earth. If you want to know what Côte d'Ivoire actually feels like from the inside, this is the post.
Ninety minutes from Abidjan, Assinie-Mafia stretches nearly twenty miles along a coastline locals call the Saint-Tropez of Africa, and after a few days there, I understood why. It's also where I watched F Tower rise on the drive home, a 64-floor building that will be the tallest in Africa when it's finished, in a country not yet sixty years removed from independence. Beaches and skyscrapers, built by the same restless ambition.
Planning Your Trip
Ghana uses the cedi; Togo and Côte d'Ivoire both use the West African CFA franc, so budget for a currency change at each border. English gets you through Ghana; French is essential for Togo and Côte d'Ivoire. All three countries connect by land — the Aflao crossing between Ghana and Togo is the route covered in the Lomé post — though border crossings here can run long, and it's worth building slack into your itinerary rather than a tight connection.
Three countries, three former colonial powers, three languages passed down like inheritances nobody asked for. Yet cross any one of these borders and the thing that actually greets you is the same: a plate pushed toward you before you've even sat down, a stranger's family making room at their table, a hospitality that had every reason, given the history, to have curdled into something else entirely, and didn't. That, more than any fort or beach or border crossing, is what I actually came home with.
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