June marks the beginning of the cold season in my part of Tanzania’s Southern Highlands. This year, I am lucky enough to be home to experience it.

Two days earlier, as we drove from the airport to my home village, I kept thinking about my childhood memories of the same season, when my entire family would be busy with coffee: picking, peeling, fermenting, washing and drying. I wondered how that experience would feel now that I am all grown up and morning coffee has become a routine I can never skip.

So, I decided I wouldn’t leave home without going to the farm at least once while I am here.

It is 6 a.m. on a cold Monday morning when my mother wakes me up to remind me that I had said I wanted to go to the farm with her. I am too lazy to get out of bed, but I am also excited to meet and talk to the women who pick coffee in my home village. I saw these women picking coffee when I was young, but I never asked them anything or cared enough to ask. Now I do.

By the time the sun begins to warm the hills of my village and the surrounding villages, several women are already scattered across the farm, each with a bucket at her feet. From a distance, I can hear laughter. The women are talking as they work, while children run among the coffee trees. The children are there because their mothers cannot leave them home alone. They spend the day close to them, playing as the buckets slowly fill.

That morning, and later on another farm in my home village, I speak to four women about their lives working with coffee.

I see a young woman and a young man picking from the same coffee tree. For some reason, I get curious about them. I approach and say hello in my local language. I find that it helps to build rapport when you share something in common. I start picking coffee with them. Their names are Jessica and Mwashiuya, wife and husband. They live close to the farm with their two-year-old daughter, Beatrice.

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Jessica, a 20-year-old woman, tells me that she started picking coffee recently. This is her second picking season. Hand-picking coffee is not as easy as many people think. It takes time to learn and requires you to be present as you do it.

“When I first started picking coffee, it was really difficult because I didn’t know how to do it. You have to select only the red cherries from the tree and leave the rest,” Jessica tells me. She adds, “But I had to learn because I needed money.”

Income-generating source

For the women I speak to, working on coffee farms is an important source of seasonal income. They are involved in coffee production long before the picking season starts, from cleaning the farms, pruning and sometimes watering the trees to later picking and sorting the coffee. They tell me most men dig holes to plant coffee trees and spray pesticides.

Take Christina Job, 45, for example. She was introduced to coffee picking in 1994 by her brothers and sisters when she was still in primary school.

“I started seeing my sisters and brothers pick coffee and get paid. I needed money, too, so I started learning how to do it,” she tells me as she continues picking the cherries.

At the time, they were paid Sh200 for a full 20-litre bucket. I jokingly ask what she used the money for and get a belly laugh out of her. “Nilikuwa nalia shuleni,” she says, explaining that she spent the money at school buying vibama, a snack.

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Christina has been doing this work for thirty-two years. She has raised her six children during those years and has worked at different stages of the coffee chain. For three years, she worked at a small coffee-processing plant in Mlowo, sorting dried coffee before it was exported. She was paid Sh3,500 for every sack she sorted.

Today, she is paid between Sh2,000 and Sh2,500 for a full 20-litre bucket, depending on the farm owner. On a good day, Christina fills up to five buckets, earning between Sh10,000 and Sh12,500. Her working day begins at 5 a.m. and ends at 3 p.m. The women are paid at the end of each working day.

I am curious to know what thirty-two years of working with coffee have enabled her to do for herself and her family.

“Pesa ya huku kwenye kahawa huwezi kujenga, hii ni ya sabuni na nguo za watoto,” she tells me. The money she earns from picking coffee cannot build a house; it pays for things such as soap and clothes for the children, she says. She calls her friend, Mama Gile, to hear how absurd my question is, and we all laugh at that sad reality.

Domestic chores

A day of coffee picking does not mean that these women are excused from domestic chores. After a full day of picking coffee, beginning at 5 or 6 a.m., depending on how far one lives from the farm where they are working that day, the women tell me they go home and spend another two to four hours doing domestic chores, including fetching water, cooking, cleaning the house and taking care of children.

Take Judith, for example.

“Nikirudi nyumbani, naenda kutafuta mboga. I clean my house and cook. By the time you finish, it is already time for bed,” she tells me.

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Judith started working on coffee farms in 1998. She has planted trees, watered them, picked coffee and sorted it. She has lived through coffee-picking prices of Sh250, Sh500, Sh800, Sh1,000 and now Sh2,000. Her friend Tadesia, who started picking coffee two years ago, jokes that when the price rises to Sh4,000, Judith will still be there.

“By then I’ll be an old woman—my body is already starting to tire,” Judith responds.

Judith picks up to seven 20-litre buckets, which earns her between Sh14,000 and Sh17,500, depending on where she is picking coffee. Since her earnings from coffee picking are insufficient, Judith has her own one-acre farm where she grows maize on half an acre and groundnuts on the other half for her own consumption and to sell for additional income.

In this area, coffee picking provides work from May to September, although the number of available working days depends on when the cherries ripen and which farms need labour. 

When the coffee season ends, the women look for work on maize, bean and other farms, where they plant, cultivate and weed. Their work changes with the agricultural season, but it remains physical and dependent on which farmers need labour.

Never tasted coffee

One thing that fascinates me is that most of the women I spoke to have never tasted coffee, even though they have spent much of their lives working with it. Perhaps this should not be surprising. 

Tanzania’s National Coffee Industry Strategy 2021–2025 put domestic coffee consumption at seven per cent, with a target of increasing it to 10 per cent. Tanzania consumes only a small share of the coffee it produces.

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Still, the distance between these women and the finished drink is astounding. They know how to identify a ripe cherry by sight and touch. Their hands help determine the quality of the harvest, yet they do not know what that harvest tastes like once it becomes a cup of coffee.

This distance is not limited to coffee workers. My mother grows coffee, but she is a tea person—a die-hard tea person. The one thing our house never lacked when I was growing up was tea in the flask, whether the sun was out or not.

Even though coffee-picking wages provide limited income, the work still gives the women room to hope for something better. Jessica, 20, is saving her earnings to start a business and build a different future for herself and her two-year-old daughter, Beatrice.

“I make Sh14,000 a day. I use Sh2,000 for food, put Sh2,000 into my kikoba and save the rest. So far, I have saved almost Sh200,000. My goal is to reach Sh800,000.”

Jessica wants to learn more about coffee because she believes it can still offer more to her family. She hopes to use her savings to establish her own coffee farm. She also dreams that Beatrice will study agriculture and that, one day, they will grow coffee together.

Jessica is trying to move from being paid for each bucket she fills to owning the trees herself. Perhaps Beatrice’s relationship with coffee will be different from that of Christina, Judith and the other women who came before her. Perhaps she will know coffee as more than the work of her hands and the exhaustion in her body.

Coffee will remain part of my morning routine. But after meeting these women, it can no longer be only what is in my cup. Long before it reaches me, it has already passed through whole lives: through Christina’s thirty-two years, Judith’s body beginning to tire, Jessica’s savings and the future she imagines for Beatrice.

Jane Shussa works at Twaweza East Africa as a Senior Digital Communications Officer. She’s available at jshussa@twaweza.org. The opinions expressed here are the writer’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of The Chanzo. If you are interested in publishing in this space, please contact our editors at editor@thechanzo.com.