Marondera – gateway to Zimbabwe’s speciality coffeeĪn hour’s drive east from Harare to Marondera on the A3 Mutare Road brings you to the Coffee Academy at 274 Chicago Drive. The coffee region stretches from Honde Valley to Vumba and Chipinge, where the higher, cooler and wetter areas produce top-quality coffee.
The eastern province of Manicaland is the home of Zimbabwe’s coffee belt, spread along the lush valleys and cool mountains of the eastern border with Mozambique. Exploring Zimbabwe’s big six coffee regions It is still possible to follow in Livingstone’s footsteps and discover Zimbabwe’s big six coffee regions. Output in Zimbabwe is estimated to increase by 10% over the next year, due to an increased global demand for the country’s coffee. Today, this exceptional brew remains hard to source, but Zimbabwe’s coffee industry hasn’t lost faith in its potential. A devastating decimation of a once-great industry. My family’s Arabica coffee plantation in the eastern Highlands was among those forced to close.
In fact, Zimbabwe lost 97% of its coffee output between 1990 – when yield was at its zenith and produced at 180 family-owned farms and a handful of commercial coffee estates – and 2018, when only three commercial coffee producers remained. Sadly, due to political unrest and extreme agricultural reforms in the late 20th century, coffee production across the perfect mountainous region declined dramatically. Victoria Falls tumbles over a precipice on the Zambezi River, the same river where Livingstone first discovered his passion for coffee back in 1853 © Simon Elton As Livingstone and his travelling companion, Dr John Kirk, continued to explore Africa, they uncovered one of the world’s most sought-after beverages, a medium-bodied and well-balanced Zimbabwean drink, once known as the ‘darling of the world’s coffee’. The relationship remained strong for three years, and Chief Sekeletu’s men accompanied Livingstone to his first sighting of the Victoria Falls in 1856. The archives explain that Livingstone’s love of coffee originated in 1853, at Linyanti on the Zambezi River, where Chief Sekeletu gifted him coffee in order to promote commerce. Original letters, diaries, journals, maps, photographs, sketches and even coffee samples from the 19th century detail European coffee discovery and exploration in Africa, today carefully preserved in the archives of the Royal Geographical Society, the National Library and Museum of Scotland, Kew Gardens, as well as many more institutions across Africa. When Scottish physician and pioneer, Dr David Livingstone, set out to explore Zimbabwe back in the mid 1800s, little did he know that his footsteps would one day be followed with great zest, not by historians and anthropologists, but by zealots of the highest order – coffee aficionados.
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