Country
Malawi
Malawi is Africa's oldest surviving tea industry: Natal in South Africa planted earlier and gave up, and Malawi is where the crop first took and stayed. It has spent the century since as an anonymous supplier, mostly CTC, mostly into blends, mostly sold under someone else's name. It is also, alongside Kenya, where African specialty tea is actually being attempted, and the small quantity of hand-made white and orthodox leaf coming out of the southern hills is the reason to look at the country at all.
What grows here
Black CTC, the great bulk of it, from the Shire Highlands in the far south, where Thyolo and Mulanje are the two names that matter. Much of it goes into blends bought for colour and briskness rather than for character. On top of that sits a very small orthodox and specialty output, effectively led by one estate: hand-rolled white teas from bud material, orthodox blacks and lately some deliberately fermented dark styles. Kenya makes hand-made white tea too, and at greater scale, but the fermented dark styles have almost no African precedent.
The ground
The Shire Highlands in the south, on and around Mount Mulanje, a granite massif that rises abruptly out of the plain and pulls rain out of the air. Altitudes are modest by African standards and well below Kenya's, and the climate is subtropical with a distinct dry season, so Malawi has a real off-season where Kenya has none. Rainfall is the chronic variable, and a drought year shows up directly in the crop.
The bushes
Assamica, imported from India in the 1920s after the original stock brought up from South Africa proved unsuited to the climate. Malawi was the first African country to move to clonal planting, from the 1950s, and it did the region's plant breeding: the Tea Research Foundation (Central Africa) at Mulanje selected and released the clones that new plantings across central and southern Africa have used ever since. That is a larger contribution to African tea than the country's own output would suggest.
Harvest seasons
Picking runs through the southern hemisphere wet season, roughly October to April, then falls away sharply in the dry months. That is the main structural difference from Kenya, which never stops. The first pickings after the rains break are generally reckoned the best, and they are where estates put their orthodox and specialty effort.
How it is made here
CTC lines for the bulk, and the interesting part is what happens beside them. Orthodox and hand processing runs next to the factory on a small number of estates, withering and rolling small lots by hand for white and orthodox teas, with fermented dark tea tried alongside them. It is a tiny share of the crop and the only reason Malawi appears in specialty catalogues, but it is also the clearest evidence that African tea does not have to be a commodity.
What to look for
Almost all Malawi tea reaches buyers unnamed, so an estate name is the single most useful thing that can appear on a label, and Satemwa in Thyolo is the one behind most of the specialty lots that reach Europe and North America: it took up orthodox production in 2006 and runs its own trade office in Belgium, so its teas arrive named rather than pooled. Treat 'African black tea' as a category rather than an origin: Malawi, Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania and Rwanda are freely interchanged inside those blends, and much of the trade passes through the same auction in Mombasa.
How it got here
Tea plants reached the mission garden at Blantyre in 1878, and the commercial industry followed in the Mulanje and Thyolo hills from the 1890s, ahead of the African producers that later dwarfed it. It grew up foreign-owned and export-facing, and smallholder growing was added much later and is now a substantial share. Tea remains one of the country's largest export earners and one of its largest formal employers, which is why a drought year is a national number and not just an agricultural one.
Places in Malawi
Named places inside Malawi. The ones with a page of their own are links.