In Lomé, Togo, they say your face is your passport.
In Lomé, I met a woman who carried hers without a wallet.
The market was already awake before the sun had fully committed itself to the sky. Dust lifted in soft spirals beneath plastic sandals. Radios argued across narrow aisles. The scent of smoked fish drifted through baskets of tomatoes and peppers warming into the morning light.
I was turning over two carved figures dark cow bone polished smooth, their cheeks etched with deliberate marks when I noticed her watching me.
She wasn’t selling. She stood with quiet certainty, wrapped in wax print the colour of mango flesh. And on her cheeks were the same markings I was studying in wood.
Not decorative, not accidental but Intentional. “You see something familiar,” she said.
Her English was better than my French measured, steady.
I held up the carving. “The guy told me these were once considered to be passports.”
She smiled. “Passports are for tourists.”
Then she touched her cheek. “This isn’t a passport It’s s family.”
“My grandmother carried the same marks” she said.And her grandmother before that. Lines carried forward before borders were drawn across this coast before someone decided that here was Ghana and there was Togo.
“When I go to the village,” she said, “old women know me. They don’t ask for papers.”
There was no nostalgia in her voice. She carried an ID card. A voter card. A mobile phone buzzing with messages of modern life. Borders are real, Systems are real, but so is lineage.
“These marks,” she said, “they tell you where I began.”
That brief conversation followed me long after I left the market.
Because chocolate also travels with its own passports.
Most bulk cocoa leaves Africa stripped of all its story beans packed into sacks, weighed, graded, containerised. Identity reduced to numbers and export codes. Origin becomes something that fits inside paperwork.
Yet cocoa, like those markings, carries memory. Soil memory. Fermentation memory. the hands that turned it and the voices that spoke over drying mats at dusk.
In the chocolate world we talk about traceability lot numbers, GPS points, QR codes. Necessary tools, certainly. But traceability without story risks becoming another form of forgetting.
That woman on the market didn’t need to explain who she was. Her face told you where she began.
And I found myself wondering what it would mean for chocolate to carry its name in the same way?
The thought stayed with me.
If we use only the bean, we tell only part of the story. If we discard the pulp, the husk, the labour, the language, something essential falls away. Whole pod became, for me, another way of saying whole story.
In Lomé, identity wasn’t laminated. It was more inherited.
And as I walked back through the market, past the radios and the rising heat, I realised I was carrying a new question one that would follow me far beyond Togo.
How do we let chocolate speak for where it comes from?
I didn’t know the answer.
But that morning, I began to listen.
Author’s Note
Across parts of West Africa, scarification once served as a quiet language written on the skin. Long before passports or printed documents, marks like these could indicate lineage, place, belonging, or passage through life. They were never one single tradition but many, shaped by community, history, and meaning.
Over time, colonial rule, urbanisation, changing social values, and modern identification systems led to the decline of the practice in many areas. Today, the marks remain for some as living heritage and for others as memory stories carried forward in family histories rather than skin.
What stayed with me in that market was not nostalgia, but recognition: the idea that identity can exist beyond paperwork cocoa, too, carries traces of where it began visible to those willing to look closely enough.