Lomé

The covered market in the centre is the city's engine, and the floor to find is the cloth. Togo has been a hub of the West African wax-print trade for generations, and the halls here are stacked to the ceiling with printed cotton in every pattern, sold by the piece rather than the metre — the standard length is enough to make a full outfit, and the tailors who will turn it into one are working within a few streets in every direction, quickly and for very little. Patterns carry names and meanings, some of them proverbs and some of them jokes, and asking what a design is called is the fastest way into a conversation with the woman selling it. That trade built real fortunes: the women who dominated it from the mid-twentieth century became known across the region for the Mercedes cars their profits paid for, and their successors still control much of the business. Around the cloth halls the market does everything else — food, spices, plastics, hardware, beads, secondhand clothes — and spills into the surrounding blocks. Go in the morning, take small notes, expect to be greeted rather than hustled, and ask before photographing anyone. Bargaining is normal, good-humoured and quick.

East of the centre, Bè is where the city began, and it feels entirely distinct from the boulevards: dense, low, Ewe-speaking, with a rhythm of its own. At its heart is a sacred forest, a genuine grove rather than a park, along with shrines that are in active use — this is the traditional religious centre of the city, and the appropriate posture is the one you would take anywhere that is somebody's place of worship. Go with someone local, ask before entering anywhere or photographing anything, and accept that parts of it are not open to visitors. The quarter also holds a large market of its own, a lagoon that the neighbourhood is built around, and streets of workshops where things are made and mended rather than sold to visitors. The religious supply market on the city's eastern edge, which serves priests and healers from several countries, is a different kind of visit from a walk through Bè, and part of the living religion along this coast.

The coast road runs the length of the city with palms and sand on one side, and it is the best orientation Lomé offers: west towards the border, east towards the beach villages and eventually the lake. The shoreline itself is working rather than recreational — the deep-water port at the western end is one of the busiest in the region, and beyond it pirogues are drawn up on open sand where the fishing fleet lands. Swimming here is genuinely dangerous, with a steep shelf, a strong undertow and no lifeguards anywhere; what the sea along this coast actually does is worth knowing before you go near it. Along the boulevard sit the city's landmarks: the independence monument, the modernist tower that has defined the skyline since 1980 with its thirty-six storeys, and — the best of them — a restored early-twentieth-century palace on the seafront that reopened as an arts centre, with contemporary exhibitions, a bookshop, a café and eleven hectares of botanical gardens running down towards the sea. That last is the most rewarding two hours in the city and the least known. The small national museum and the cathedral, a striking piece of period architecture near the market, complete the central circuit.

Lomé is a better city after dark than before it. The everyday eating is street food and small courtyard restaurants — grilled fish and chicken over charcoal, brochettes, fried yam and plantain with pepper, and the dough-and-sauce plates that are the country's staple — and the city also has a genuinely good restaurant scene at the upper end, with strong Lebanese and French kitchens reflecting long-settled communities. The institution to understand is the buvette: an open-air drinking place, often just a yard with plastic chairs and a fridge, that grills to order and stays open late, and which is where most of the city's socialising actually happens. Live music is the other reason to stay up. The city has a long highlife and Afro-jazz tradition and bands play through the weekend in bars and clubs, mostly getting going far later than northern visitors expect — nothing much happens before eleven. Move around by taxi rather than on foot late at night, agree the fare before setting off, and treat the small hours in unlit streets with the same caution you would anywhere. The menu rewards knowing four or five names before your first evening — what to order, and what to drink with it.