In 1997, just as I had finished my O Levels, I travelled to Kagera, my hometown in the Northern part of Tanzania. Sadly, I had gone for my paternal Great Grandmother’s funeral in Bwera, a village where she hails from. I am grateful to have met my Great Grandparent and may her wonderful soul be well rested.
After about a month in Bwera, I was getting nervous about my future plans for going to High School. As I waited for my O Level results, this was the time I had to explore schools and do interviews. Somehow I knew what needed to be done but I opted for a lazy choice and left it to my parents to work out things for me. I didn’t bother to even ask.
I had now left Bwera village and I was in Bwoki, our home village and ancestral home, where my Father, Omtware Justinian Rutasitara has a big lush farm. Just like many farms in the area, they are mainly banana plantations. Ebitoke “a banana dish” as we call it in our Haya tribe, is our staple food. The farm also has Coffee Trees in some designated areas within the plantation, ebiribwa “cassava trees”, ebikwara “arrow roots”, some orange trees and papaya trees. Seasonal crops such as maize and beans would also be planted. Talk about sustainable ecosystems, my Dad also had cows for milk and manure.
While in the village, it was time to get my hands dirty as I waited for high school plans to play out. I think my Dad saw me as a spoilt lazy city boy. He wasn’t far from the truth, it was the first time I had to spend so much time in the village. Usually, together with my siblings, we would visit during school holidays and it was time for us to play, visit relatives and neighbors, work a little bit and before we knew it was time to go back to Arusha, where I grew up. But this time it wasn’t a holiday and had nothing really to go back to in Arusha. My Dad, a retired Civil Servant and now a full time farmer, loved his farm and this man worked tirelessly. He had served the Government of Tanzania as an Auditor for years during late Mwalimu Nyerere’s era. His work ethics and integrity were impeccable. In the farm, he was always up-to something, one minute he is with a panga, the next he has a kyabyo, a stick…then a spade, gum boots on etc., He did this from as early as 6am to 7pm. If the sun could stay on and if he had enough battery powered torches to light the whole farm, I bet you he would continue working.
Fast forward, around June 1998, it was the coffee harvesting season. Coffee beans were starting to change color from dark green transitioning to ripe red. My Dad would inspect the coffee trees and advise us on which ones to start harvesting from. My Dad never entertained us being in bed beyond 6:30am something that I now dearly enjoy on weekends to make up for those days. Only one of our Sister wasn’t forced out of bed in the morning apparently because she used her free time to read books unlike the rest of us who didn’t seem to have a mission. As soon as we woke up, brushed our teeth and washed our faces with cold water, it was time to go to the farm as you stretch out the sleep from your system. I hated the cold feeling of wet leaves and humidity from the grass on my feet as we walked the farm in the morning.
We would lay magunia “a big wooven mat made out of sisal” under the tree we are to harvest the coffee from. The mat is to help reduce the number of coffee beans falling directly to the farm ground. Using hooks made from tree branches, Pantaleo “my Dad’s right hand man” would pull down big coffee tree branches to bring them closer to the ground. We would then use our hands, wrapped around a coffee tree branches and pull down the coffee beans until all the off shoots of the branch have been harvested of the coffee beans. Careful enough not to ruin the shoots but fast enough not to spend the whole day on the same tree. Sometimes Pantaleo would hang on the branch to keep it down as we do the harvest. He made it look fun. My younger brother Mwesiga would more than often take breaks by cracking jokes and telling us all sorts of stories. My Dad would send him to the house to check if breakfast was ready when he noticed he was getting out of it. It would take about 30 to 45 minutes to finish harvesting all the coffee beans from one tree and sometimes we would leave unripe coffee beans for the next round.
Breakfast was usually served around 9:30am. We used to long for this moment. How do you wake up at 6 am, work and have breakfast at 9am? Breakfast at home is called “Ekyai” literally meaning Tea. To expedite the tea boiling, using dry coffee tree sticks to fire up the tea pot was equivalent to using pressured cooking gas.
Coffee was never served for breakfast. Only when there was no tea leaves would we opt for coffee and this was very rare. I however must say, during my last year of O levels, to keep me awake at night as I studied to prepare for final exams, I drank coffee, a brand called Africafe, an Instant Coffee from Tanzania. I still think it is the best. I am not sure if it was the coffee or the struggle to understand what I was reading that kept me awake.
Our breakfast was several cups of milk tea accompanied by either ebichoori “boiled maize” (if in season), ebikwaara, left over bananas or bread if my Dad went to town that weekend. My breakfast plate now looks very different, black tea, eggs, a toast, bacon and Uplands sausages. Who am I?
Before going for breakfast, we would load the harvested coffee beans in big buckets and take them to the front yard of our house where we will spread them on the ground for the beans to be gradually dried by the sun. Our homes in the village do not have gates but they usually have ekibuga long “front yards”. Other than prestige depending on the size of your front yard, it is also used for drying grains.
After breakfast, we will again be in the farm harvesting from one coffee tree to the other and shipping out buckets of harvested coffee beans to the front yard. Lunch was usually around 1:30pm
I recall my Dad asking sarcastically “inywe nimchumba amabaare?” (are you cooking stones?), if lunch was delayed. Sometimes a raw cassava root would be pulled out and serve as a good snack. Depending on how much harvesting was planned for that day, one would be lucky to get a power nap after lunch before going back to the farm.
By around 4:30pm before the ground cools off and the coffee beans are still warm, it was time to collect the coffee beans from the front yard again using buckets and pouring them in massive wooden boxes that my Dad had in one of the stores. The coffee beans will then be nicely covered with the woven sisal mats overnight to minimize the loss of heat which is supposed to help the coffee beans to dry. After this, we had some free time including going for a bath, usually in the river nearby as it was much more easier than fetching water back to the house. Some days I will pass on the showers if it felt too cold to go shower.
The next morning, the first activity would be to take out all the coffee beans from the wooden boxes again using buckets back to the front yard for their daily sun bathing treat. This cycle of harvesting, drying the coffee beans in the sun, storing them overnight in the store and back to the front yard in the morning would continue for several weeks until all the coffee beans had been harvested and the coffee beans are completely dry. This is when we would then pack them in sacks of about 50 kilograms each. I remember from my Dad’s farm alone, we would have up-to 15 sacks of dried coffee beans from one harvest.
It would mark the end of the season, when we put the sacks of dried coffee beans on a wheel barrow enroute to Omusosaiti “the Coffee Union” collection point, where they will be weighed and checked in. My Dad would monitor the news on the price of coffee and payments.
In our culture a visitor to the house is usually offered emwaani “cooked and dried coffee beans” to chew on as snacks. I need to find out why, maybe it keeps them on a high.
Payments for coffee sold were never on time. It was this season’s harvest whose payment we were now waiting for so as I could go to High School. My other siblings had already gone back to school using funds from other sources.
My Dad had identified a newly established High School in Bukoba, called Kashozi Secondary School, which was owned and run by the Kagera Coffee Union. I didn’t know of this school, but being a school owned by a Coffee Union, it goes without say that it must be well resourced. I enrolled for Physics, Chemistry and Biology. I guess it would have been very interesting to also find subjects on coffee but there were none.
Unlike my siblings, it was my first time going to a boarding school but I was ready, I was mentally prepared for the new experience. My Dad dropped me off at the school with my silver grey metal trunk for storing stuff, a mattress and other necessities. I was ready.
Even though the school was resourced from coffee, in my head I knew school is for academics and not for coffee chores. Yes, and as luck would have it, I was right, there were no coffee farms or a single coffee tree in our school. But wait, we had a tea plantation. What? However, tea harvesting was only a once in a while Saturday chore. Now that I think of it, what was the rationale for having a tea plantation in a Coffee Union run school? Interestingly, tea wasn’t on the breakfast menu, this time it was porridge made of maize flour.
Anyway, not much of my lifestyle changed while in school. We still had to wake up for mchaka mchaka (morning runs) at around 5:30am, we would then go shower in the river after the run and in the evening after classes, as there was no running tap water at School. We would have breakfast at around 9:30 am after some classes. We used kerosene lamps to study at night as we did not have electricity. Yes, its a true story. It was scenic seeing hundreds of lit lamps after dinner heading to classrooms for self study.
Just like how my Dad had to wait for long before payments from coffee sales came through, we also had to wait for long periods and lost some semesters before we could have teachers for all subjects, books and laboratory equipment. As a student it was difficult to relate the pride of coffee as a major export and what we experienced in a school owned by a coffee union. I am not a type of person who gives up or not finish what I set out to do. Coffee from my Dad’s farm paid the school fees, I worked for it too, at least my Dad can prove it. I finished High School in the same school after a single failed attempt to be moved to another school.
Now that I am working in an International organization, mornings are dominated by cups of coffee, get me a cappuccino, I didn’t have my coffee this morning, I need an espresso to wake up etc. What is with coffee? I am still a tea person. I was done with coffee, coffee was for studying. I once brought my famous africafe instant coffee as a gift to my boss and he diplomatically said who drinks instant coffee? I then got to learn of brewed coffee and other types of coffees — why didn’t I learn this when farming coffee? In my travels to Italy, in the morning I would see long queues of people at coffee shops waiting to get their shot of single/double espresso with a bottle of cold water.
Agriculture has been the backbone of Tanzania’s economy and coffee was a major export commodity — at least that is what we were told growing up.
When I look back, I am conflicted about the whole coffee ordeal. While in high school, I remember having to dissect a cockroach as part of my practicals and final exam but I never received a single lesson on managing at least a coffee plant. The knowledge I gained from my Dad remained in Bukoba and after school I had no new knowledge to give him about coffee and he had no savings as he used the money from coffee sales for our school fees and upkeep. None of my siblings are farmers. We are all now based in the cities. I own La Fiesta Lounge, a restaurant/pub which also serves coffee but not coffee from our farm — I simply never got to learn the ABCs of processing drinking coffee, it wasn’t part of the curriculum at home or in school. None of my colleagues left school with new knowledge about coffee or the economics of coffee.
If I was to do it all over again, I would request to be educated and document coffee farming best practices. This is a document each homestead with a farm should have and passed on to generations to come. I would recommend for Schools in the regions that grow coffee to have special classes on the ABCs of coffee and the economics of coffee from elementary level. Coffee farmers like my Dad should be equipped with technology to improve efficiency while encouraging local processing of coffee. Imagine if my Dad processed and branded his coffee in the 1990s, we would now be celebrating over 20 years of producing organic coffee. I now have softwares such as Info Nauza for managing businesses including production that would significantly improve decision-making for my Dad to run his farm as a business.
By virtue of us growing up working the coffee plantations and farms, many of us are already a skilled labour force to reckon with. What we did were not merely chores but actual valuable economic activities beyond self sustenance. How we use these farm skills, knowledge and experience we gain in school and at work to improve our ancestral homes with lush farms in our backyards is paramount. These homes are generations of knowledge and wealth that are mostly under valued if not neglected.
I have seen the two sides of coffee.
We farm coffee but I don’t consume it for leisure. Coffee paid my school fees and I studied in a school run by a Coffee Union that had neither a coffee farm nor a class on coffee. Coffee, I laboured for you and you schooled me but when I drink you, you leave me with a bitter sweet taste.
