These two countries form an irregular rectangle, taller than wide, with a northeast bulge. The southern 100 kilometers is coastal lowlands, rising quickly to a savannah plateau. The Atakora Mountains, aligned more or less north-south, occupies the north center. A tributary of the Volta flows across the northwest to exist into Ghana, and the rivers that drain the northeast empty into the Niger which forms part of Benin's frontier. Other rivers flow north to sokuth to reach the Bight of Benin.
There is no unambivalent lingustic majority. While French is official, few speak it from birth. The dialects collectively labeled Gbe(2) by scholars represent just under half of first language speakers, and a majority can understand a version of it. The two most important dialects are Fon(3) and Ewe(4). Gbe is in the Left Bank Group of Kwa, and this group does constitute a local majority.
Yoruba dialects are spoken by almost one in ten, mostly in Benin. Kabiye, one fo the many Gur languages spoken locally, is the only other language spoken by more than one in twenty.
The majority practice indiginous religions, the most famous being that practiced by Gbe speakers: Vodun. Locally this belief honors ancestors and recognizes families of spirits. Each of these tends to have a hereditary clergy. Important spirits or families of them include the Mami Wati water goddesses; Legba--a young male god of sex; Gu, connected to iron working; and Sakpata, connected to diseases. This religion, in modified form, spread through slavery to Brazil(5), the Caribbean and New Orleans.
Other groups practice other local religions, although there is some crossover; for example the Yoruba thunder spirit is sometimes considered an equivalent to Legba.
Christians represent more than one in four, with the majority of those Roman Catholic, and the rest Protestants. More than one in seven people are Moslems, mostly Sunni.
Lome, Togo's capital, on the Bight of Benin, is famed for craftsmen of gold, silver and marble. Cotonou, Benin's capital of day to day political administration, is on a sand spit between the bight and a lake. Neither city has as many as a million residents.
Gbe speakers are said to have orignated in the sokuth edige of Togo's savannah plateau at sites of ancient earth works and migrated south and east. Yourba and other Defoid languages probably originated where they are now spoken. Slave traders, and later rival European colonial administrators pushed particular Bge coastal dialects, and European missionaries introduced Christianity. Islam may have arrived hundreds of years ago when it penetrated Ghana, or in the 19th century when it conquered Hausaland.
The existence of supreme deities that are distant from day to day practice, and, at the same time, of other deities--the case for many local religions including that of the Yoruba--sometimes indicates religious evolution with the detached god previously holding a more prominent place.
north, from the northeast
east
south
west
north of Togo, and northwest of Bening
(1) Formerly known as Dahomey
(2) The word for language.
(3) More properly Fogbe.
(4) More properly Evegbe. Alkso called Ephe or Eve.
(5) Officially Brasil.