Country
Uganda
Uganda is one of Africa's largest tea producers by volume and the one whose industry was destroyed and rebuilt inside living memory. The estates were largely owned by Ugandan Asians, who were expelled in 1972; output collapsed and did not recover until seized property began to be returned in the 1990s. The volume came back. The price did not. Ugandan tea sells at the bottom of the Mombasa table, well under Kenya and far under Rwanda, and it has done for years.
What grows here
Black CTC, almost entirely, and the belt is in the west. Toro around Fort Portal and Kabarole is the historic core, with Kyenjojo beside it and Bushenyi holding the largest number of growing households in the country. Kigezi in the far southwest, meaning Kanungu, Kabale and Kisoro, is the highest and coldest part and runs straight into Rwanda's tea country. Hoima, Kibaale, Mityana and Mukono carry plantings in the centre. Mount Elgon on the Kenyan border is a separate eastern pocket.
The ground
The western belt runs along the rift shoulder and the Rwenzori foothills, equatorial, wet and high enough to crop year round. Kigezi at the southwestern end is higher and cooler again, and geologically it is the same tea country as northern Rwanda with a border drawn across it. Mount Elgon in the east is an unrelated volcanic massif shared with Kenya. The ground is not this industry's problem, which is worth saying plainly given where Ugandan tea sits at auction.
The bushes
Clonal assamica from the East African research lineages the region shares. Uganda's tea research sits at Rwebitaba in Kabarole, part of the national agricultural research system, and rehabilitating it has been a recurring line in sector plans. Much of the smallholder planting is old and under-fertilised, which matters far more here than variety does.
How it is made here
CTC in roughly thirty-five factories, and the quality problem sits upstream of all of them. The trade blames coarse plucking, gardens that have gone years without fertiliser and long journeys between plot and factory for the gap between Ugandan and Kenyan leaf. Estate-based and investor-owned factories that buy outgrower leaf as a supplement generally do better on price than the large farmer-owned factories, which are squeezed between payment delays and under-used capacity.
What to look for
Ugandan tea is bought to be cheap and almost never reaches a drinker under Uganda's name, so a single-origin Ugandan is unusual and should carry a factory name. Two things follow. The price gap is about grade and consistency rather than about the land, so a well-made Ugandan lot can be a genuinely good buy. And a lot of tea is currently not being picked at all: gardens in Tooro and Kigezi have been abandoned rather than uprooted as farm-gate prices fell, which is recoverable but means volumes are moving.
How it got here
The colonial government introduced tea around 1900 in central Uganda, but real production waited until the 1950s, when estates went in at Toro, Mityana and Kimara and the Uganda Development Corporation built factories at Hoima, Bushenyi, Kabarole, Kyenjojo, Kibaale and Mukono. In 1972 Idi Amin expelled Uganda's Asian population, who owned most of the estates. Production peaked at roughly 22,000 tonnes in 1974 and had fallen to about 1,700 by 1981, with a state tea authority running what was left. Recovery began when expropriated property started to be returned from the early 1990s.
Places in Uganda
Named places inside Uganda. The ones with a page of their own are links.