The short version. Around 97 per cent of Zambia's exportable coffee comes off five estates in the Northern Province, three of them within reach of Kasama, the provincial capital, on a plateau at about 1,300 to 1,400 metres. The estates carry more than five and a half million trees, employ about 3,000 people year-round and more than 15,000 at harvest, and grow Catimor 129, Castillo and Java under irrigation drawn from the rivers that also feed Chishimba Falls. This is where the coffee in an Imvelo bag was grown. Here is the place.
At 7.30 on the morning of Thursday 14 November 1918, on the north bank of the Chambeshi River south of Kasama, a German general named Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck was handed a telegram by the District Commissioner for Kasama, a man called Hector Croad. It told him the war in Europe had ended three days earlier.
His column had just taken the town. He had fought across East Africa for four years without being caught, and he learned of the Armistice from a British civil servant on a riverbank in Northern Rhodesia. A stone pillar marks the spot. Beside it stands a captured German field gun which, the heritage record admits, had nothing to do with that particular morning. Eleven days later he surrendered at Abercorn, now Mbala, to the north.
Kasama sits at 1,374 metres above sea level. Britannica says 1,330. The plateau is not flat, and neither figure is wrong.
Where it is
Kasama is the capital of Zambia's Northern Province, about 856 kilometres by road north-east of Lusaka on the Great North Road, with a station on the TAZARA line that runs from Kapiri Mposhi to Dar es Salaam. It stands on the northern reach of the central African plateau, a high, gently rolling surface that carries on through Mbala and Mporokoso towards Lake Tanganyika.
The rains come between November and April. The rest of the year is dry, and in the north the dry season runs six or seven months, which is why the woodland burns in September and why coffee can be picked and dried here without rain on the patios. Two rivers matter for this story: the Chambeshi, where the telegram was delivered, and the Luombe, which waters an estate and then falls sixty metres at Chishimba.
Why coffee grows here
Arabica wants altitude, rain, a dry season to ripen and dry in, and no frost. The Kasama plateau supplies all four in moderation. It is not the high, cold, volcanic country of Kenya's Nyeri or Ethiopia's Yirgacheffe, and the cup shows it: rounder, less sharp, more chocolate than blackcurrant. I would rather say that plainly than sell you a Kenyan cup that never arrives.
What the plateau lacks in height it makes up in water. The estates irrigate from dams, canals and reservoirs built on the plateau's rivers, which lets them carry trees through the dry months that a rain-fed farm elsewhere could not.
A note on geography that keeps turning up on labels, including ours. The Mafinga Hills, Zambia's highest ground at 2,339 metres on the Malawi border in Muchinga Province, are not where this coffee grows. Importers sell Kateshi and Ngoli lots as "Mafinga Hills" coffee. Our own 1 kg bag says "Muchinga Highlands", and our product page has said "peaks to 2,300 metres". The estates sit at 1,300 and 1,400 metres on the Kasama plateau, so the bag's altitude line, 1,200 to 1,400 metres, is the honest one. The rest needs fixing, and I would rather say so here than wait for a reader to catch it.
The estates
Northern Coffee Corporation Limited, part of ofi, the food-ingredients arm of the Singapore-based Olam Group, runs five estates in the province: Kateshi, Ngoli and Luombe around Kasama, and Isanya and Nsunzu further north towards the Tanzanian border. Olam bought the company from the Zambian state in 2012 for US$6.15 million. Between them the five estates hold about 7,200 hectares of land, of which roughly 2,171 hectares were under coffee in 2022, on the company's own figures as reported in the Times of Zambia. In March 2015 its general manager, Paul Bebbington, was reporting 1,300 hectares of cultivated coffee on four estates, so the planted area grew by about two-thirds in seven years.
Kateshi, the largest and oldest, sits at about 1,300 metres, Ngoli at about 1,400. Together those two cover 1,726 hectares, of which 1,039 are planted to coffee and 687 are held as conservation areas and buffer zones, according to the estate profile published by the importer Covoya; the 2,171-hectare figure above is for all five estates. Both carry Rainforest Alliance, UTZ and 4C certification. The fields grow Catimor 129, F6, Castillo and Java, with other varieties on trial.
| The estates in numbers | Figure | Whose number, when |
|---|---|---|
| Land held, five estates | about 7,200 ha | NCCL via Times of Zambia, August 2022 |
| Under coffee, five estates | about 2,171 ha | NCCL via Times of Zambia, August 2022 |
| Under coffee, four estates | 1,300 ha | NCCL via Lusaka Times, March 2015 |
| Kateshi and Ngoli, planted | 1,039 ha of 1,726 ha | Covoya estate profile |
| Kateshi and Ngoli, conservation and buffer | 687 ha | Covoya estate profile |
| Trees, five estates | more than 5.5 million | ofi via Global Coffee Report, July 2023 |
| People employed | about 3,000 year-round, more than 15,000 at harvest | ofi via Global Coffee Report, July 2023 |
| Investment since 2012 | more than US$30 million by 2015, more than US$70 million by 2022 | Lusaka Times, 2015; Times of Zambia, 2022 |
By 2023 ofi was describing more than five and a half million trees across the five estates, about 3,000 people employed year-round and more than 15,000 during the picking season, which makes it the largest employer in the Northern Province. The clinic at Kateshi serves more than 8,000 people from the surrounding villages.
In 2019 a naturally processed lot from Ngoli won Zambia's Taste of Harvest competition and placed second at the African regional round against the winning lots of every other origin on the continent. Starbucks Reserve has poured lots from Isanya and Ngoli.
How it got here
Coffee is not old in Kasama. Two of the three Kasama estates trace back to a World Bank project of 1978, when the Zambian government was looking for anything that would reduce its dependence on copper; Kateshi itself is usually dated to 1972. Sources disagree on the exact years and I am not going to pretend they don't. In 1984 the International Coffee Organization granted Zambia an export quota of 350 tonnes, and in 1985 the country exported coffee formally for the first time. Production rose from 71 tonnes in 1982 to 380 in 1985 as the first plantings came in.
The state company did not prosper. A University of Zambia history thesis on Kateshi and Ngoli from 1967 to 2012 describes a parastatal with some early success that did not last. Disease took out trees. The country's crop, which peaked at about 6,654 tonnes of green coffee in 2004/05, roughly 111,000 bags, had fallen to about 180 tonnes by 2015, on the figures in Omwani's Zambia sourcing guide.
Olam bought the estates in 2012 and replanted. By 2019 the crop was back to about 2,000 tonnes, and the growers' association put the 2024/25 season at about 4,200 tonnes, from six commercial growers in the whole country. Ethiopia picks hundreds of thousands of tonnes a year. That scarcity is most of the reason so few people outside Zambia have tasted this coffee, and it is the reason we bother.
The town beyond the coffee
Kasama is the heart of Bemba country. The Chitimukulu, the Paramount Chief of the Bemba, holds court nearby, and every August the Bemba gather at Mungwi for Ukusefya pa Ng'wena, a ceremony re-enacting the migration of the Bemba from Kola in the north-west, with the crocodile, the ng'wena, as the royal clan's totem.
Thirty-odd kilometres north-west of town, the Luombe River drops about sixty metres in three steps at Chishimba Falls: the Mutumuna upper fall of roughly twenty metres, the Kayela rapids of ten, and the main Chishimba fall of thirty, with a fifteen-megawatt ZESCO power station drawing off the flow. The Bemba hold the falls sacred. The same river, further up, waters the Luombe estate.
About five kilometres east of town, the Mwela rocks hold one of the densest concentrations of rock paintings in Africa: more than 700 on the Zambian heritage commission's count, more than 1,000 on the UNESCO tentative-list description. They were declared a national monument in 1964. Hunter-gatherers painted them thousands of years before the Bemba arrived, and long before the coffee or the railway.
What this means for the cup
A coffee grown at 1,300 metres on Catimor and Castillo, washed and irrigated, is a different animal from a coffee grown at 2,000 metres on SL28 in Kenya. It is lower in the bright acids and higher in body. Sweet Maria's, who have sold green coffee to home roasters since the 1990s, describe Zambian coffee as balanced and less bright and acidic than other East Africans. Coffee Review, tasting a Zambian lot, found delicate acidity, a very silky mouthfeel, and a flavour that settles toward chocolate in the finish.
People who do not usually like coffee tend to say that is what they like about it. People who love Kenyan coffee tend to say it is what is missing. Both are right. It is a plateau coffee, and it tastes like one.
What we can say about ours
Imvelo's Zambian coffee comes off this northern shelf and is roasted in Lusaka by Mwamba Mulunda, whose name is on the bag. We buy it green, roast it in the city, and sell it in the country it grew in. Most Zambian coffee leaves the country as green beans and is roasted somewhere else. Ours does not, and that is the whole point of the roastery.
The plateau, in a bag.
Shop the Zambian single origin
More from this series: why a Zambian bag is closer to harvest than most of what is on a northern shelf, what the miombo woodland does for the cup, and an introduction to Zambian coffee.
Frequently asked questions
Where is Kasama? In Zambia's Northern Province, about 856 kilometres by road north-east of Lusaka, at roughly 1,374 metres above sea level on the central African plateau.
Who grows coffee in Kasama? Almost all of it is grown by Northern Coffee Corporation, a subsidiary of ofi, on five estates: Kateshi, Ngoli, Luombe, Isanya and Nsunzu. Zambia's coffee growers' association counted six commercial growers in the whole country in 2025.
What coffee varieties grow in Kasama? Catimor 129, F6, Castillo and Java on the main estates, with other varieties on trial. Older Zambian farms elsewhere grow SL28 and Bourbon.
When is the Kasama coffee harvest? May to September, with most of the picking between June and August. Specialty lots typically ship between June and August.
What is there to see in Kasama? Chishimba Falls on the Luombe River, the Mwela rock paintings, the Chambeshi Monument where the First World War's last fighting stopped, and, in August, the Ukusefya pa Ng'wena ceremony of the Bemba at Mungwi.
Sources
Global Coffee Report, "Ofi explains how it's unleashing Zambia's potential as a coffee producing country", July 2023. Times of Zambia, "Northern Province: Zambia's leading coffee producer", August 2022. Lusaka Times, "Northern Coffee Corporation works impress PS", March 2015, and "ZDA sells Northern Coffee to Olam International for US$6.15M", September 2012. Covoya Coffee, "Zambia Estate RFA Natural" product pages (Kateshi and Ngoli altitudes, hectares, varieties, certifications, Taste of Harvest 2019) and "History of Zambian Green Coffee". Omwani, "Zambia Coffee Production & Sourcing Guide", April 2023. Zambian Business Times, "Zambia has only 6 active coffee farmers, ZCGA", 2025. University of Zambia, "A history of coffee growing in Zambia: the case of Kateshi and Ngoli estates in Kasama district, 1967 to 2012". Sweet Maria's Coffee Library, Zambia overview. Coffee Review, review of a Zambian coffee from The Roasterie. Starbucks Reserve menu, "Sun-Dried Zambia Ngoli Estate". Wikipedia entries for Kasama, the Chambeshi Monument (which reproduces the plaque text), Chisimba Falls, Chishimba Hydroelectric Power Station and Mwela Rock Paintings; Britannica, "Kasama"; National Heritage Conservation Commission of Zambia, "Mwela Rock Art Paintings"; UNESCO tentative list, "Mwela Rock Paintings"; Zambia Tourism, "Ukusefya Pa Ngwena Ceremony". Mafinga Hills height: Wikipedia, "Mafinga Central".