Country
Mozambique
Mozambique is the African tea industry that got big first and then stopped. At mid-century the Portuguese colony was among the continent's largest tea exporters, all of it out of one district in Zambezia, and Gurué grew into a company town on the strength of it. Independence and then sixteen years of civil war emptied the estates and stripped the factories. What exists now is a partial rebuild of a few of them under foreign owners, and the country has never got back to where it was.
What grows here
Black tea from Zambezia province in the centre and north, effectively from one district. Gurué, under Mount Namuli, holds the main estates, including a very large organic block at Magoma, with further planting around Milange on the Malawi border. Two or three estate companies do nearly all of it. Smallholder outgrowing exists but is thin beside the estates, which is the reverse of the pattern in Kenya, Rwanda and Tanzania.
The ground
Mount Namuli, Mozambique's second highest peak, is the reason any of this exists. The massif pulls heavy orographic rain onto the slopes below it, which is why one district in a country that is mostly hot and dry supports tea at all. Gurué's rainfall is among the highest recorded in Mozambique and the soils under it are deep and acidic. Step outside the Namuli catchment and the crop stops.
The bushes
Assamica, from the Portuguese plantings of the 1920s and 1930s and from replanting since. At Magoma a large part of the recovered area was regrown from bushes that had stood untended for decades, and bringing those back into bearing is most of what rehabilitation has meant here.
What to look for
Mozambique is effectively one region, so the estate name is the only distinction available. Nearly all of the crop is sold in bulk for blends and for bottled iced tea, which means most people who have drunk it did so out of a bottle without being told. Where a single-origin does surface it is usually organic-certified leaf from Gurué. Claims about the world's largest organic tea garden come from the estate that owns it, so read them as marketing rather than as something you can check.
How it got here
The Portuguese planted tea in Zambezia in the 1920s and 1930s, inside a colonial economy that ran on forced labour, and by mid-century it was one of the territory's main export crops, with its own brand and its own air link into Gurué. Independence came in 1975, the estates were nationalised, and the civil war of 1977 to 1992 emptied them: bushes went wild, factories were stripped. Recovery was slow and mostly foreign-financed. The Magoma estate changed hands in 2012 and was brought back into production from the mid-2010s, decades after the fighting stopped.
Places in Mozambique
Named places inside Mozambique. The ones with a page of their own are links.