Kenya, officially the Republic of Kenya, is a country located in East Africa. With an estimated population of more than 52.4 million as of mid-2024, Kenya is the 27th-most-populous country in the world and the 7th most populous in Africa. Kenya's capital and largest city is Nairobi.
A Brief History of Kenya
Kenya's earliest inhabitants included some of the first humans to evolve from ancestral members of the genus Homo. Ample fossil evidence for this evolutionary history has been found at Koobi Fora. Later, Kenya was inhabited by hunter-gatherers similar to the present-day Hadza people. According to archaeological dating of associated artifacts and skeletal material, Cushitic speakers first settled in the region's lowlands between 3,200 and 1,300 BC, a phase known as the Lowland Savanna Pastoral Neolithic.
European contact began in 1500 AD with the Portuguese Empire, and effective colonisation of Kenya began in the 19th century during the European exploration of Africa. Modern-day Kenya emerged from a protectorate, established by the British Empire in 1895 and the subsequent Kenya Colony, which began in 1920. Mombasa was the capital of the British East Africa Protectorate, which included most of what is now Kenya and southwestern Somalia, from 1889 to 1907.
Numerous disputes between the UK and the colony led to the Mau Mau revolution, which began in 1952, and the declaration of Kenya's independence in 1963. After independence, Kenya remained a member of the Commonwealth of Nations. Kenya is a presidential representative democratic republic, in which elected officials represent the people and the president is the head of state and government. The country is a member of the United Nations, the Commonwealth, World Bank, International Monetary Fund, World Trade Organization, COMESA, International Criminal Court, as well as several other international organisations.
Kenya's economy is the largest in East and Central Africa, with Nairobi serving as a major regional commercial hub. With a per-capita Gross National Income of $2,110, the country is a lower-middle-income economy. Agriculture is the country's largest economic sector; tea and coffee are the sector's traditional cash crops, while fresh flowers are a fast-growing export. The service industry, particularly tourism, is also one of the country's major economic drivers.
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The Rise of Tea in Kenya
During the early part of the 20th century, the interior central highlands were settled by British and other European farmers, who became wealthy farming coffee and tea. One depiction of this period of change from a colonist's perspective is found in the memoir Out of Africa by Danish author Baroness Karen von Blixen-Finecke, published in 1937.
The first tea tree ever planted in Kenya was in 1903. Today, modern Kenya exports more black tea than any country in the world. Most commercial tea grows in shrubs or bushes that are pruned to a height between 22 and 48 inches for easy picking.
The Mombasa Tea Auction
The Next Frontier: Mombasa tea auction
By tradition, East African tea sells at auction in the port city of Mombasa - and the Mombasa Tea Auction may be one of the last places on Earth where Old World manners prevail. At the Mombasa Tea Center, roughly a hundred traders and nearly a dozen brokers come together on Mondays and Tuesdays and, ever so politely, move an enormous amount of black tea around the world.
East Africa sells hundreds of millions of tons of tea every year, and lately, the price has been at an all-time high. "Yes, sir!" is what traders say when they bid on an offering of tea. It's all part of the tea-trading vernacular in this former British territory, where black, white and Indian traders compete for the best of what's around.
The scene unfolds the same way week after week in this cozy, wood-trimmed amphitheater. Everyone sits in assigned seats, and the auctioneer stands at a lectern below. Brewed tea in glistening white mugs and saucers is served promptly at 10 o'clock. The women wear spectacles and comfortable shoes, while men sport Oxford shirts and ties. It's warm in Mombasa, so jackets are implied.
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Chemweno says all the buyers sample the tea weeks in advance so that by auction day, they already know what's brisk, what's bright and what's bad. A trader who wants to raise a bid can simply say, "Up," or he can back away by saying, "Out." Someone who wants to claim the highest bid tells the auctioneer to "Knock it, sir," and then the gavel falls.
Kenyan Tea Today: Key Players and Unique Flavors
In 1992, the market was liberalised, allowing other players to operate. Mutahi saw this as an opportunity and a trip to Mombasa to meet with players in the tea industry followed in 1994. It was good advice as she realised she needed to differentiate her product. As a tea lover, she would often purchase fresh ginger to flavour her drink. “I wondered how many other people were doing this,” she recalls.
With its unique Melvins ginger tea, the company did not struggle to get listings in the bigger supermarkets and business gradually picked up. During this time, Mutahi had to train herself to be a tea taster (something that usually takes years at a registered tasting school) as she could not afford the services of a professional.
Melvins Teas does not have its own tea farm. It procures tea from different areas in the country and then contracts factories to process it. Melvins’ unique proposition is that it is all-natural. “We mill our ingredients from scratch and work with outgrowers for our flavours such as camomile and lemongrass; we don’t use artificial preservatives or flavourants.
Yusuf Masudi is a manager at Unilever Tea's Mabroukie Estate in Limuru, Kenya. In the cool hills high above Nairobi, where the people live among the clouds, there are giant tea trees more than 100 years old.
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The lack of value-addition in the country’s tea industry bothers Mutahi. “About 95% of the tea grown here is sold and exported in bulk. Export markets now include Rwanda and Melvin Marsh has its sights set on West Africa.
The Global Tea Market and Kenya's Place in It
Broker Tom Muchura has been at this for nearly 40 years. In the tea business, Muchura says, you've got to keep tabs on anything that can affect sales worldwide: weather, roads, political instability, lifestyle changes.
For instance, Britain has been eclipsed as Mombasa's top buyer by Egypt and Pakistan, where people still take time to brew tea the old-fashioned way. "These are very much Muslim countries," Muchura says, adding, "Because they stay away from other beverages, I believe that's why they have continued to drink more tea."
Companies blend the teas they buy at auction according to elaborate recipes. Indian teas provide heft, Sri Lankan teas bring flavor, and African teas bring color and strength.
Overall, the quality of Kenyan tea has consistently remained high. And the combination of higher quality and lower yields due to East Africa's drought has helped push the average price of a kilo to an unheard-of $2.70.
After water, tea is the world’s most popular beverage, with over 3 billion cups being drank every single day. In the last two decades alone, tea consumption has increased 60% as reported by StopTheTraffik in 2017.
Ethical Considerations in the Tea Industry
The most popular tea-growing nations include China, India, Kenya, and Sri Lanka, and they all have one thing in common: large instances of human trafficking. 7 million new victims are forced from tea farms into human trafficking each year.
As with any product, the tea supply chain is intricate and hard to navigate. Simply put, the five main steps are: growing, processing, auctioning, blending and packaging, and finally the retail marketplace. One interesting aspect of the tea industry is that human trafficking has no implications in any stages of the supply chain except the very first one: growing. It is on these plantations that workers are exploited for free labor and their families are manipulated into multiple different forms of trafficking, such as child labor and sex trafficking.
The best way that consumers can help aid in the effort to end human trafficking, specifically in the tea industry, is to begin a trend within the tea-buying community.
Tea Culture in Africa
A continent full of lush forests, sipped on the infusion of the Rooibos bush for hundreds of years. Unknown to the pleasures of tea leaves, Africa experienced tea only after South Africa was colonized by the British. Tea was introduced to South Africa in 1850 when the seeds of the Assam Tea were imported from Calcutta and grown here for commercial purposes.
In West Africa, the tea ceremony goes by the name ‘attaya’, and is anything but formal. Every attaya consists of three rounds of tea drinking. According to a legend, the first round of tea is very bitter and it represents the beginning of life and the pains of growing up. The second round is sweeter with a hint of mint. This symbolizes the sweetness of mid-life, love and marriage.
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