To catch you up to speed: the independence movement of the comparatively small African country of Togo was led by a man named Sylvanus Olympio. Sylvanus Olympio was a graduate of the London School of Economics, a former general manager of Unilever’s African division, and a member of the powerful Olympio family, one of the richest families in the Togo-Benin region at the start of the 20th century. All in all I think it’s safe to say that Sylvanus Olympio had a national bourgeois consciousness: he wanted the Frogs out because they screwed him over personally, and the Frogs in turn had him killed and replaced by comprador leaders, because old S. Olympio dared to dream of a future outside of the CFA franc.

This being said: the Olympio family. There’s more than one person in Togo’s political sphere with that surname. Sylvanus Olympio obviously had relatives in older generations who were well-to-do, and he also had children of his own who survived him. One of these children being Gilchrist Olympio, who led “Togo’s main opposition party from the 1990s until 2013” — that party being the Union of Forces for Change, which split in 2010 after G. Olympio signed an agreement on behalf of his party without consulting the party’s national office, to participate in a “government of national recovery” with the ruling party, the rightist comprador Rally of the Togolese People (soon to be rebranded as “Union for the Republic” or “UNIR” for short). The anti-power-sharing splinter of the Union of Forces for Change is called National Alliance for Change and has been led by Jean-Pierre Fabre for the past sixteen years.

But the thing is: I also found out that there’s a different, extraparliamentary opposition party in Togo called “Parti des Togolais”, currently led by Nathaniel Olympio, and before him led by Alberto Olympio.[1] Alberto, turns out, is the nephew of Gilchrist,[2] i.e. Alberto is the son of one of Sylvanus’ other children; and Nathaniel is Alberto’s brother,[3] i.e. another grandson of Sylvanus and nephew of Gilchrist.

Another thing for our consideration: the official YouTube channel of CGTN Français last year uploaded a video titled “Une délégation de cadres togolais visite le Musée du Parti communiste chinois”. Its description reads,

(Machine translation)

On September 11, a delegation of officials from the Union for the Republic (UNIR) of Togo, led by Barcola Essowè, Togolese Minister of Economy and Finance and member of the UNIR Political Bureau, visited the Communist Party of China Museum in Beijing, China.

Barcola Essowè stated that he now has a deeper understanding of the role of the CPC as the true leading force in China’s development and construction.
This year marks the 80th anniversary of the victory in the Chinese People’s War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression and the World Anti-Fascist War. After visiting the Communist Party of China Museum, Barcola Essowè said he deeply felt the unity and resilience demonstrated by the Chinese people during this extremely difficult period. “China and Africa thus share similar experiences. What is truly admirable is that, under the leadership of the Communist Party of China, the Chinese people have remained closely united, overcome crises under very difficult conditions, and ultimately achieved victory. This fighting spirit and successful experience deserve to be learned and remembered by African countries, including Togo,” he stressed.

Union for the Republic, as established, is the rightist comprador political party which succeeded the Rally of the Togolese People as an effective rebrand of that party. Given the party’s notorious fascist and anti-communist aspects, I have to find this whole video very curious. Contrarily, Nathaniel, Gilchrist and other opposition figures seem to be covered favorably by Voice of America. These are both artifacts of realpolitik, I’m sure, but I would like to understand the exact dynamic at play to the best of my ability.

  1. What is the position/role of the UNIR in present-day Togolese politics? I have characterized them as rightist compradors, but they have cooperated with both China and Russia in recent years. This is to be expected to some extent, but could this nevertheless signal (the beginnings of) a shift in the party’s role in Togolese politics? What could be driving such a shift?
  2. What is the position/role of the opposition in present-day Togolese politics? They seem very concerned with electoralism and term limits. Is the opposition’s interest, being traditionally led by a national-bourgeois family, mainly just in having the Togolese government represent the interests of more sections of the country’s bourgeoisie? Is Seppoland’s apparent interest in the Togolese opposition because multi-party politics is a “smoother” neocolonial operation than effective one-party comprador rule?
  3. What are the different opposition parties’ roles relative to each other?[4] Is the opposition being deliberately splintered?
  4. What is the Olympio family’s role in the Togolese opposition? How centered are Togolese opposition politics on this one family? What are their interests? I have assumed national bourgeois. Why did Gilchrist Olympio want so badly to participate in that “government of national recovery” with the ruling comprador party, when doing so meant creating a crisis in his own party?

I’m sure that some people might look at Togo and think it’s “just some random small country in Africa,” but Togo’s capital Lomé, as the only deep water port in West Africa, is in fact the fourth busiest container port on the entire continent of Africa, and a Lloyd’s List 2024 Top 100 global port overall, according to the official website of Seppoland’s embassy in Togo, who describe the port as a “vital logistics hub connecting [West Africa] and the Sahel” and as “West Africa’s gateway for US business opportunities”. So Togo very well might deserve more of our attention, particularly given the landlocked AES’s reliance on the Port of Lomé.

  1. Source: https://d3n8a8pro7vhmx.cloudfront.net/partidestogolais/pages/123/attachments/original/1412538159/Discours_du_5_Octobre_Président_Aberto_OLympio.pdf?1412538159 ↩︎

  2. Source: https://www.modernghana.com/news/578333/togos-main-opposition-leader-to-run-for-president-in-2015.html ↩︎

  3. Source: https://www.republicoftogo.com/toutes-les-rubriques/medias/affaire-de-famille ↩︎

  4. As an aside: when machine translating that PDF I found from the Parti des Togolais, it hallucinated that CDPA stood for “Coalition of Democratic Action for Progress” instead of “Convention démocratique des peuples africains”. ↩︎

    • Erika3sis [she/her, xe/xem]@hexbear.netOPEnglish
      5·
      9 days ago

      I’m afraid I have no good answers: getting other people to answer that sort of thing, or at least lead me towards the answers, is why I made this thread.

      By my own understanding, Togo and the AES seems like a case of interdependence: the AES countries need Togo for sea access; Togo needs the AES countries for port traffic. Togo certainly seems like the dominant force in this contradiction, but this doesn’t mean that the AES cannot assert its own interests against Togo in turn. How or when the AES might do so, and if the AES is doing so right now, is completely beyond me; but a thought that came to me when learning about Togo’s recent diplomacy with Russia and China is whether this might be related to pressure from the AES. But I am already speaking more than my shallow investigation gives me the right to.

    • Erika3sis [she/her, xe/xem]@hexbear.netOPEnglish
      3·
      9 days ago

      Another thing: it seems difficult to find out much about the Communist Party of Togo (PCT), who are apparently Hoxhaists. Their own website apparently went offline in either 2018 or 2019; their most recent publication on ICOR’s website was in 2023 and does not talk about their own country at all, but rather presents their analysis of an “inter-imperialist rivalry in Sudan”. Nevertheless, we can still infer from their belief that Russia and China are imperialist powers, that they do not see the UNIR’s diplomacy with these countries as in any way contradicting the party’s comprador character.

      I, however, do not consider Russia and China to be imperialist countries, so this answer doesn’t satisfy me. Perhaps the ruling comprador party is increasingly seeing the writing on the wall, given not just growing popular dissent towards the party, but the broader fall of neocolonialism in West Africa; and this changing tide is causing the party to pivot at least a little more towards Russia and China in a bid to hold onto power — but I don’t know enough about the nature of the region nor the nature of the diplomacy nor the nature of the world in general to really say.

      Aside from the Communist Party of Togo, I also found this auto-dubbed YouTube video by a Togolese political scientist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gUBU0yM6fL0 — the video basically argues among other things that the opposition parties, such as those led by the Olympios post-Sylvanus, serve to legitimize the F. Gnassingbé regime in sort of a football-lucy way, and that it’s time for a popular revolution in Togo outside of the electoral process to remove F. Gnassingbé from power for good.

      Compare this to this quote from a 2018 publication by the Communist Party of Togo:

      It is in this way that our Party, -PCT-, has engaged with enthusiasm, and every day gives us proof of the universal relevance of Marx and Marxism-Leninism. Thus, when, following the popular insurrectionary movement that ignited our country in 1990-1991, the Togolese liberal bourgeoisie embarked on the path of conciliation and negotiations with autocratic power by proclaiming that the solution for democracy was the holding of a “sovereign national conference” followed by the formation of a “Transitional Government”, then the elaboration of a “democratic” constitution, and they suggested that the solution for democracy would be accompanied by the formation of a “Transitional Government”, followed by the elaboration of a “democratic” constitution, and all this without touching the authority, it was the teachings of Marx and Lenin that guided our Party, enabled it to see clearly in this situation, to avoid the quagmire of the conciliatory path and to propose the only path that met the interests of democracy and the people, that of organization and struggle.

      (Machine translation corrected by myself)

      Which makes it seem like the PCT would agree at least to some extent with the analysis provided by TV TOGO-POLITICS, even though TV TOGO-POLITICS doesn’t seem to be a communist by any means.