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Ewe Unification Movement
The Ewe Unification Movement (French: Mouvement d'unification Ewe) was a series of west African ethno-nationalist efforts which sought the unification of the Ewe peoples spread across what are now modern Ghana and Togo. It emerged as a direct political goal around 1945 under the colonial mandate of French Togoland, however the ideal of unifying the group has been an identifiable sentiment present amongst the ethnicity's leadership and wider population ever since their initial colonial partitions by the British and German Empires from 1874 to 1884. While there have been many efforts to bring about unification, none have ultimately been successful due to both the platform itself often being a secondary concern for political leadership, or inter/intrastate conflicts overshadowing them.
A loose conception of an Ewe identity has existed through a shared origin myth surrounding the Togolese town of Notsé and a subsequent exodus from it due to the tyranny of its king Agokoli, but historical evidence for this specific tradition's basis in reality is lacking. The more accepted version of their history follows the group's 1600s westward migration from the town of Ketu around the Benin-Nigeria border after pressures began to mount from the neighboring Yoruba. After settling in their current territories around the Volta Region, the Ewe were fragmented into a menagerie of chiefdoms and villages called dukowo, though they sometimes consolidated into military alliances against external threats such as the Akwamu in 1833, or Ashanti in 1868. While no fully unified Ewe character had consolidated at this point, because conflicts between different dukowo were common — such as those between the Anlo and Gen in the 1680s — Ewe nationalists eventually took advantage of the aforementioned shared traditions and moments of cooperation during the colonial period.
Ewe interaction with Europeans prior to colonization was primarily confined to trade along the Gold & Slave coasts and mouth of the Volta River. However, this changed once the British Empire began asserting itself in the region to establish its own west African colonial claims from 1850 to 1874. In accordance with this new colonial rush, the German Empire, too, established its own holdings along the coast in 1884, thus dividing the Ewe between two colonial powers.
It was with this division that the Ewe identity began to become politically salient, as many within their leadership protested the consequent restriction of movement through what they had begun to see as a unified Ewe territory.
Under German colonial rule, a common governing ethos was that of divide et impera, which sought to exacerbate their various colonial subjects' cultural identities against each other to prevent larger political units from forming against their imperial hegemony. This manifested itself in German Togoland with the pitting of the Ewe peoples against other more allegedly barbaric groups, like the Ashanti, by German Protestant priests from the Norddeutsche Missionsgesellschaft. Under the ethos, these priests translated the Protestant Bible into a standardized Ewe language, and utilized it and the resulting linguistic studies to consolidate a shared Ewe identity based around a common language to loosely unify their disparate polities further.
During the first World War, the Ewe in the British Gold Coast Colony actively supported their overlords in the Entente, while those in Togoland mostly withheld loyalty from their own colonizer, in the hopes that the defeat of the Germans would unify the Ewe peoples under one government.
When the war ended, the British and French divided Togoland between themselves. This ultimately only served as a partial unification of some Ewe — for while many in the west now found themselves essentially unified under two British colonial administrations, the rest in the east were placed under a French mandate. This tripartite division between the Gold Coast Colony and British & French Togoland left many Ewe leaders dissatisfied, but voicing their concerns ultimately, having been brought by the Congress of British West Africa to British administrators for consideration in 1920, yielded no change.
Around 1945, various members of Ewe and wider Togolese leadership began the construction of political organizations which sought to decolonize French Togo. These developed as the Comité de l'Unité Togolaise, led by Sylvanus Olympio, and the Mouvement la Jeunesse Togolaise. Both possessed political platforms that included the reunification of the separate British western and French eastern Togolands, and, for the Ewe, this implied a reunification of their eastern populations.
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Ewe Unification Movement
The Ewe Unification Movement (French: Mouvement d'unification Ewe) was a series of west African ethno-nationalist efforts which sought the unification of the Ewe peoples spread across what are now modern Ghana and Togo. It emerged as a direct political goal around 1945 under the colonial mandate of French Togoland, however the ideal of unifying the group has been an identifiable sentiment present amongst the ethnicity's leadership and wider population ever since their initial colonial partitions by the British and German Empires from 1874 to 1884. While there have been many efforts to bring about unification, none have ultimately been successful due to both the platform itself often being a secondary concern for political leadership, or inter/intrastate conflicts overshadowing them.
A loose conception of an Ewe identity has existed through a shared origin myth surrounding the Togolese town of Notsé and a subsequent exodus from it due to the tyranny of its king Agokoli, but historical evidence for this specific tradition's basis in reality is lacking. The more accepted version of their history follows the group's 1600s westward migration from the town of Ketu around the Benin-Nigeria border after pressures began to mount from the neighboring Yoruba. After settling in their current territories around the Volta Region, the Ewe were fragmented into a menagerie of chiefdoms and villages called dukowo, though they sometimes consolidated into military alliances against external threats such as the Akwamu in 1833, or Ashanti in 1868. While no fully unified Ewe character had consolidated at this point, because conflicts between different dukowo were common — such as those between the Anlo and Gen in the 1680s — Ewe nationalists eventually took advantage of the aforementioned shared traditions and moments of cooperation during the colonial period.
Ewe interaction with Europeans prior to colonization was primarily confined to trade along the Gold & Slave coasts and mouth of the Volta River. However, this changed once the British Empire began asserting itself in the region to establish its own west African colonial claims from 1850 to 1874. In accordance with this new colonial rush, the German Empire, too, established its own holdings along the coast in 1884, thus dividing the Ewe between two colonial powers.
It was with this division that the Ewe identity began to become politically salient, as many within their leadership protested the consequent restriction of movement through what they had begun to see as a unified Ewe territory.
Under German colonial rule, a common governing ethos was that of divide et impera, which sought to exacerbate their various colonial subjects' cultural identities against each other to prevent larger political units from forming against their imperial hegemony. This manifested itself in German Togoland with the pitting of the Ewe peoples against other more allegedly barbaric groups, like the Ashanti, by German Protestant priests from the Norddeutsche Missionsgesellschaft. Under the ethos, these priests translated the Protestant Bible into a standardized Ewe language, and utilized it and the resulting linguistic studies to consolidate a shared Ewe identity based around a common language to loosely unify their disparate polities further.
During the first World War, the Ewe in the British Gold Coast Colony actively supported their overlords in the Entente, while those in Togoland mostly withheld loyalty from their own colonizer, in the hopes that the defeat of the Germans would unify the Ewe peoples under one government.
When the war ended, the British and French divided Togoland between themselves. This ultimately only served as a partial unification of some Ewe — for while many in the west now found themselves essentially unified under two British colonial administrations, the rest in the east were placed under a French mandate. This tripartite division between the Gold Coast Colony and British & French Togoland left many Ewe leaders dissatisfied, but voicing their concerns ultimately, having been brought by the Congress of British West Africa to British administrators for consideration in 1920, yielded no change.
Around 1945, various members of Ewe and wider Togolese leadership began the construction of political organizations which sought to decolonize French Togo. These developed as the Comité de l'Unité Togolaise, led by Sylvanus Olympio, and the Mouvement la Jeunesse Togolaise. Both possessed political platforms that included the reunification of the separate British western and French eastern Togolands, and, for the Ewe, this implied a reunification of their eastern populations.