The first time I saw this strange structure, I was sitting in a taxi traveling from Aflao to Aného.
“What is that?” I asked the driver, pointing toward the rusty skeleton stretching into the Atlantic Ocean.
He tried to explain. Unfortunately, his English was as limited as my French. After a short conversation involving broken sentences, hand gestures, and several confident nods from both of us, I understood almost nothing.
Was it a bridge? An abandoned railway? A failed attempt to build a road across the ocean?
A few days later, after returning to Lomé, curiosity dragged me back to the beach. I walked right up to the structure, examined its rusting beams, touched one of the supports, and asked myself the only sensible question:
What in the world is this thing?
It looked as though it had been standing there for centuries, yet also seemed ready to collapse before I finished taking photographs.
I later learned that it was the old Lomé Wharf, a landing pier once used to move passengers and cargo between ships and the shore. German engineers first built a wooden wharf between 1899 and 1900, followed by a much larger metal pier whose construction began in 1901 and was completed in 1904.
After the French took control of Togo, they repaired and later replaced parts of the damaged structure, with major work carried out around 1928. Railway tracks once ran along the wharf, carrying goods between the sea and the city.
When Lomé’s modern port opened in 1968, the wharf was abandoned. The ocean, salt, and time took over.
Today, it stands on the beach like a retired giant: rusty, tired, slightly dangerous, but still determined to attract questions from passing travelers.