Lassa Travel Guide

 grets Says:  Unique to the Kabye people is the tradition of using broken pieces of pottery as ornamentation on the floor of their courtyards. It is basically a single colour mosaic making patterns on the floor. It is very decorative, but the pictures don’t do it justice as it was such... 

 grets Says:  The villagers put on an impromptu dancing show for us when we visited. Initially it was just a couple of women, and I must admit I thought they had just been trying too much of the millet beer, but gradually more and more people joined in, including a couple of musicians,... 

 grets Says:  The Kabye people are a small ethnic minority group of Togo, accounting for about 12% of the population. They are found mainly in the north of the country, in the region around Kara. They are most noted for their agriculture and farming. The last two presidents of Togo came... 

 grets Says:  You would enter the compound through a vestibule, into the main courtyard. Each compound consists of a house for the husband and one for each of his wives, various storage and granary buildings and maybe a kitchen. Picture one shows children playing in the courtyard. Picture... 

 grets Says:  The Kabye people build their houses in a unique style called sokala. It means that each family compound has the walls attached to the next house, thus in effect creating an entire fence around the compound. It is the same principle that we would call link-detached in... 

 grets Says:  Once the beer is ready to drink, it is sieved through a fine mesh – in this case a packing sack and into a container below. This is to remove any larger particles and make it more potable for drinking. The resulting pulp left inside the sieve is spread out on the ground to... 

 grets Says:  The local brew of choice is the millet beer. Millet and water is fermented over heat for a couple of days then stored for another couple of days in order to get the required strength. The longer it is left the stringer it is. We tasted two beers of different age, and could... 

 grets Says:  Millet is grass-like grain grown throughout Togo for use as food for humans and animals. Millet is separated from the husks by beating it hard and repeatedly with a stick, then washed, toasted and dried. It can then be eaten more or less as it is, just boiled with water... 

 grets Says:  The ubiquitous goats are found everywhere – every village has them and every available pieces of land, be it beside the road or between the buildings in the town had one or more goats grazing on it. Goats are one of the oldest domesticated animal species, being kept for... 

 grets Says:  Noah told us the name of this medicinal bush was ESRON - but I have been unable to find any details about it on the net since returning home. He told us it has antibiotic qualities and is used by the locals to treat all manner of diseases. 

 grets Says:  The so called calabash container is named after the calabash tree. It is the fruit or gourd which is used to make the containers so widely used throughout Africa (and other parts of the world), and is one of the earliest cultivated trees in the world grown not for food but... 

 grets Says:  The Baobab tree is sacred to the Kabye people and they will always ensure that they build their village adjacent or near to a baobab tree. They also worship the tree and will build shrines at the base of the trunk, where offerings are placed and sacrifices made. When a new...