You can reach this ancient ANLO town from at least three directions. From the east, you will drive through vanishing coconut plantations, once upon a time, a major supplier of copra to Europe, through very old villages such as Adina, Blekusu and Havedzi until you reach the place where the sea meets the lagoon; a place where ferocious battles have been waged between the natural forces of land, sea and lagoon.

If you had arrived at this battlefront a few years ago, five years or more, you would have reached the only crossing point from where you can proceed on your way to Keta from the east. Today, a lovely road, a scenic ride indeed, bridges the meeting point of sea and lagoon. The road is part of the recently completed sea defence project.

In the past, you would have crossed in a canoe, or if you are lucky, been ferried over in one of those modern contraptions, a cross country vehicle, for a handsome fee. It is from this crossing that you will begin to appreciate the beauty of the land over which you travel. This is the site that must have met the eyes of the old ANLO sojourners, who, history said, crossed unto the coast from Adudu, near Wheta, on their flight from Notsie in the Republic of Togo, somewhere in the 14th century.

The sea, on a calm day, is a deceptively docile body of water that laps gently at the shore.

The lagoon, one of the largest in West Africa, stretches over twenty miles westwards as far as the eyes can travel, tranquil, a series of dazzling hazes gently whipping its surface. You may catch a glimpse of fisherfolk in their little canoes on the lagoon, plying their trade, raising a trap here, throwing a cast net there, silent, intense.

Or the travellers from the northern shores, floating as it were, in larger canoes with single sails full blown by a benevolent wind carrying them to the market at Keta. Or when the lagoon shows its other munificent character, your eyes will behold a vast glistening expanse of whiteness, and on the horizon, towards the litorals shadows, people winning salt on commonly held community property. You approach Keta today, even by this new road, through the ancient but diminished towns of Kedzi and Vodza, the latter, once notorious for its slave market in the bad days of the trans-Atlantic trade in human beings.

A couple of old islands that used to inhabit the lagoon on your left have become enlarged and increased by heaps of sand won from the base; they are now bird islands. They have, when even small, always been. On a clear day, at sunset, your eyes will meet large and intermittent flights of sea gulls sailing on perfect winds on their way to spend the night on those islands.

From the west, you can reach Keta by the tarred road that comes through Dabala from the Tema – Ada- Sogakope road, left-wheeling at Savietula near Srogboe, winding its way through the ANLO traditional capital, the seat of the Super Paramountcy, ANLOGA through Woe, where an old lighthouse that once guided old sailing ships still casts its regular beam across both sea and land, then through Tegbi, once a thriving fishing and coconut centre.

You will then begin the journey into Keta proper, past the cemetery where ancestral bones from older cemeteries now beneath the waves have been transferred, past the hospital and the electricity station. You are actually in Dzelukope, now the centre of Keta, the town that for many centuries played host to the refugees of old Keta whenever their habitations were set on fire by a succession of European predators, Danes and British.

Old Keta, the remnant of where the sea gave up after many ferocious assaults on the settlement, is a memorial to the indomitable spirit of the African man.

The market, with its multiple steps that led down to the lagoon shore line, is no longer a bustling place of trade and commerce. The steamers have stopped coming, over forty-years now, and the sea is silent about it. There is no trace of the batala or the big boats that brought in the goods from the ships.

The impressive churches of the American Episcopal Zion Mission, the newest Christian faith to come to town, or the oldest, the Presbyterians from Bremen in 1853, are all in the sea. The long coastal road from Adzido through Awusawoto is now a memory. One recalls the evenings when that street was the food lover’s paradise: amadetsi and yakayake, tsitsinga, akple and fetridetsi, where the bachelors sat around tables lit by naked oil lamps and ate their fill.

There are still a few old buildings, including the remnants of the old Danish Fort which has had a chequered history. But who are the people of Keta?  Keta can be described as the confluence town that gathered unto herself many peoples, who, driven by various forces of history, pacific or bellicose, came to seek refuge. She also gathered unto herself all the ANLO settlers from the northern shores of the lagoon – Anyako, Seva, Konu, Fe, Afiadenyigba, Atiavi, Fiaxor, Alakple, Tsiame, Wheta, Klikor and beyond.

Settlers came form the east, from what was called Old Popo, Anexo, exploiting ancient ties of brotherhood and even uncertain alliances through difficult war years. Half the people of Keta have relatives in Lome and the rest of Togo, in Glidzi, Agbedrafor, Tsevie. Names such as Acolatse, Tamakloe, Fiawoo and others repeat themselves on both sides of a divided people.

Then over the years, as far back as the opening decades of the 19th century, when the European fury against a people determined to be free abated, Keta drew to herself people from as far as Benin or old Dahomey; from Freetown, Sierra Leone, came merchant families; from northern Nigeria came the remnants of refugee armies and colonial recruits who clung, over the years, to their faith as Moslems. Many, with the exception of the Moslems, through inter-marriages, were absorbed into an elastic ANLO clan system which gave full citizenship to even “strangers” so long as they would contribute to the welfare of their adopted home.

Down the years, in the Post-Second World War years, Keta received Kwahus, Ashantis, Ga-Adangmes, Ningo fishermen, Lagosian traders and Zabrama settlers. They became part of the thriving cosmopolity of Keta, where Akan, Ada, Arabic ( in the mouths of the Syrian and Lebanese ) and Hausa were heard in the market, on the streets and on the storefronts.

Keta, over 500 years old, is a melting pot that never shed its original ANLO pedigree. She was a lovely hostess on a turbulent sea front, whose intrepid citizens, against all odds, fought to build a safe haven.

The very names of the people suggest the presence and force of Europe in the town’s history and her very family formations. There are names derived from Denmark, Britain, Portugal through Brazil and the Levant.

A wonderful combination of geography and history and an ecology of place conspired to produce a unique people who, though drawn from many strands, yet give full expression to the finest ancestral shrines and stool houses. The people of Keta retain stability in modernity, resilience in the face of relentless adversity. For years, the seashore was emptied of the fishermen, as haphazard iron groins erected by politicians of those times, and the pounding waves that rocked new and ancient houses to the ground, made fishing, the trade on which Keta was founded, impossible. There is a smile on the faces of the people today. It is a smile of hope and infinite or, at least, new possibilities, that the sea defence project, upon its completion, raises.

Let us hope this hope is not forlorn.