The Homeland Study Group Foundation (HSGF), a secessionist group based in the Volta Region has finally declared the former U.N Trust territory an independent state. The 85 years old founder and leader, Mr. Charles Komi Kudzordzi alias Papavi Hogbedetor made the declaration at a public gathering in Ho today, Saturday November 16, 2019 after he is arrested and whisked to Accra and subsequently released some six months ago. The declaration event took place at the former premises of Unity Rural Bank, which is just few meters away from the Ho Police Training school.
Papavi Hogbedetor, the HSGF leader, speaking in his native Ewe language recounted their struggle to restore the pre-independence Western Togoland territory, a German protectorate which was illegality made to part of the then Gold Coast to form the new independent country which is Ghana on March 6, 1957 under circumstances the group believed were illegal. Setting the grounds for the declaration Saturday afternoon, he said ” We’ve all witnessed what happen recently when we (Volta region) were forgotten by the government in its budget. Can a parent can forget about their children? We’re not their children, so they have forgotten about us.”
Mr. Papavi then went ahead to declared the Western Togoland independent. “from midnight today November 16, 2019 entering tomorrow, We’re now Western Togoland State”, he was quoted as saying. The announcement sent his supporters and Western Togoland advocates into wide jubilation, as some waved the supposed flag of the Western Togoland.
Mr. Papavi, however was driven away from the scene by his loyalists in a waiting private car to an unknown destination. Western Togoland could become the world’s youngest nation after South Sudan if the today’s declaration is able to draw the needed recognition from other sovereign states and the international community.
Togoland was a German colony on the Gulf of Guinea, West Africa between 1884-1919. The Germans intended to make Togoland a model colony. Because the region lacked mineral resources (its phosphate reserves were not then known), Germany concentrated on agricultural development. Valuable oil palms grew naturally near the coast. The origin and ethnogenesis of the ancient ethnic Ghanaians is traceable to nomadic migration from Nubia along the Sahara desert then south to the Gold Coast and Gold Coast region from the 10th century AD to the 16th century AD.
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