(Dates in italics indicate de facto continuation of office)

Togo, officially the Togolese Republic ⁱ/ˈtoʊɡoʊ/, is a country in West Africa bordered by Ghana to the west, Benin to the east, and Burkina Faso to the north. It extends south to the Gulf of Guinea, on which the capital Lomé is located. Togo covers an area of approximately 57,000 square kilometres (22,000 sq mi) with a population of approximately 6.7 million.

Togo is a tropical, sub-Saharan nation, highly dependent on agriculture, with a climate that provides good growing seasons. The official language is French, with many other languages spoken in Togo, particularly those of the Gbe family. The largest religious group in Togo are those with indigenous beliefs, and there are significant Christian and Muslim minorities. Togo is a member of the United Nations, African Union, Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, South Atlantic Peace and Cooperation Zone, La Francophonie and Economic Community of West African States.

From the 11th to the 16th century, various tribes entered the region from all directions. From the 16th century to the 18th century, the coastal region was a major trading centre for Europeans in search of slaves, earning Togo and the surrounding region the name "The Slave Coast". In 1884, Germany declared Togoland a protectorate. After World War I, rule over Togo was transferred to France. Togo gained its independence from France in 1960.

General Gnassingbé Eyadéma (born Étienne Eyadéma, December 26, 1935 – February 5, 2005), was the President of Togo from 1967 until his death in 2005. He participated in two successful military coups, in January 1963 and January 1967, and became President on April 14, 1967. As President, he created a political party, the Rally of the Togolese People (RPT), and headed a single-party regime until the early 1990s, when reforms leading to multiparty elections began. Although his power was seriously challenged by the events of the early 1990s, he ultimately consolidated power again and won multiparty presidential elections in 1993, 1998, and 2003; the opposition boycotted the 1993 election and denounced the 1998 and 2003 election results as fraudulent. At the time of his death, Eyadéma was the longest-serving ruler in Africa.

Eyadéma was born on the 26th of December 1935 in Pya, a village in the prefecture of Kozah in the Kara Region, to a peasant family in the Kabye tribe. According to Comi M. Toulabor, his official date of birth is “based on a fertile imagination” and it would be more accurate to say that he was born around 1930. In 1953, Eyadema joined the French army where he was trained in weapon use and the art of war. Eyadema participated in the French Indochina War and the Algerian War. After nearly 10 years in the French army, Eyadema returned to Togo in 1962. In 1963, he conducted a military coup against President Sylvanus Olympio, who died during the attack. He helped establish Nicolas Grunitzky as the new President of Togo. In 1967, Colonel Eyadema of the Togolese Army led a second military coup against Grunitzky. Eyadema installed himself as president on 14 April 1967 as well as Minister of National Defense, an office that he assumed for 38 years.

Alassane Dramane Ouattara (French pronunciation: [alasan wataʁa]; born 1 January 1942) is an Ivorian politician who has been President of Côte d'Ivoire since 2011. An economist by profession, Ouattara worked for the International Monetary Fund (IMF) - where he rose to be deputy head - and the Central Bank of West African States (French: Banque Centrale des États de l'Afrique de l'Ouest, BCEAO), and he was the Prime Minister of Côte d'Ivoire from November 1990 to December 1993, appointed to that post by President Félix Houphouët-Boigny. Ouattara became the President of the Rally of the Republicans (RDR), an Ivorian political party, in 1999.

Ouattara was born on 1 January 1942, in Dimbokro, Côte d'Ivoire, French West Africa. He is a descendant from his father's side of the Muslim rulers of the Kong Empire, also known as the Wattara or Ouattara Empire. He received a bachelor of science degree in 1965 from the Drexel Institute of Technology, which is now called Drexel University, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Ouattara then obtained both his master's degree in economics in 1967 and a PhD in economics in 1972 from the University of Pennsylvania.

Barack Hussein Obama II (ⁱ/bəˈrɑːk huːˈseɪn oʊˈbɑːmə/; born August 4, 1961) is the 44th and current President of the United States. He is the first African American to hold the office. In January 2005, Obama was sworn in as a U.S. Senator in the state of Illinois. He would hold this office until November 2008, when he resigned following his victory in the 2008 presidential election.

Born in Honolulu, Hawaii, Obama is a graduate of Columbia University and Harvard Law School, where he was the president of the Harvard Law Review. He was a community organizer in Chicago before earning his law degree. He worked as a civil rights attorney in Chicago and taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School from 1992 to 2004. He served three terms representing the 13th District in the Illinois Senate from 1997 to 2004.

Following an unsuccessful bid against the Democratic incumbent for a seat in the United States House of Representatives in 2000, Obama ran for the United States Senate in 2004. Several events brought him to national attention during the campaign, including his victory in the March 2004 Illinois Democratic primary for the Senate election and his keynote address at the Democratic National Convention in July 2004. He won election to the U.S. Senate in Illinois in November 2004. His presidential campaign began in February 2007, and after a close campaign in the 2008 Democratic Party presidential primaries against Hillary Rodham Clinton, he won his party's nomination. In the 2008 presidential election, he defeated Republican nominee John McCain, and was inaugurated as president on January 20, 2009. Nine months later, Obama was named the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize laureate. In April 2011, he announced that he would be running for re-election in 2012.