Slave Coast of West Africa in the context of "Lagos Lagoon"

Togo, officially the Togolese Republic, is a country in West Africa. It is bordered by Ghana to the west, Benin to the east and Burkina Faso to the north. It is one of the least developed countries and extends south to the Gulf of Guinea, where its capital, Lomé, is located. It is a small, tropical country, spanning 57,000 square kilometres (22,000 square miles) with a population of approximately 8 million, and it has a width of less than 115 km (71 mi) between Ghana and its eastern neighbor Benin.

Various peoples settled the boundaries of present-day Togo between the 11th and 16th centuries. Between the 16th and 18th centuries, the coastal region served primarily as a European slave trading outpost, earning Togo and the surrounding region the name "The Slave Coast". In 1884, during the scramble for Africa, Germany established a protectorate in the region called Togoland. After World War I, Togo was transferred to France with its contemporary borders. Togo gained independence from France in 1960. In 1967, Gnassingbé Eyadéma led a successful military coup d'état and became president of an anti-communist, single-party state. In 1993, Eyadéma faced multiparty elections marred by irregularities, and won the presidency three times. At the time of his death, Eyadéma was the "longest-serving leader in modern African history", having been president for 38 years. In 2005, his son Faure Gnassingbé was elected president.

The Forte de São João Baptista de Ajudá (in English: Fort St. John the Baptist of Ouidah) is a small restored fort in Ouidah, Benin. Built in 1721, it was the last of three European forts built in that town to tap the slave trade of the Slave Coast. Following the legal abolition of the slave trade early in the 19th century, the Portuguese fort lay abandoned most of the time until it was permanently reoccupied in 1865.

In the aftermath of the creation of the French colony of Dahomey in the 1890s, the French authorities recognized Portuguese sovereignty over the fort due to the adamant insistence of Portugal. The fort was garrisoned by a small detachment of troops from Portuguese São Tomé and Príncipe until 1911. After that, only the residente (governor), his assistant and their families inhabited the fort. Portuguese sovereignty was maintained until the fort was seized by the authorities of the newly independent Republic of Dahomey (now Benin) in August 1961.

The Costa da Mina (lit. 'Coast of the Mine'), sometimes shortened to Mina, is a Portuguese term for the loosely defined coastal region in Western Africa that sometimes overlapped with parts of the Gold Coast and the Slave Coast. The region was initially settled by the Portuguese due to its gold mines, but came to be an important site during the Atlantic Slave Trade after the establishment of the Portuguese Gold Coast colony. The name of the region is preserved in place names, languages, and communities in Western Africa and Brazil.