Located on the southern west coast of Africa, Angola was once a leading powerhouse in coffee production. In the 1970s, the country produced more than 230,000 tons of coffee annually and used to compete with Uganda and Côte d’Ivoire for the top coffee exporter position in Africa. By 2017, according to the United Nations Agency for Trade and Development (UNCTAD), Angola had produced 8,000 tons of misery.
But now after nearly 22 years of peace, the country is bouncing back with the Angolan government investing $12 million and private companies expanding into the global market once again, led by Café Cazengo which is considered one of the most dynamic coffee producers in the agricultural heartland east of Angolan capital, Luanda.
Coffee and the Fight for Independence in Angola
Angola is located on the southwest coast of the African continent between Namibia (to the south) and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (to the north). This massive country—roughly twice the size of Texas—was once a significant producer of coffee, and coffee workers played an important role in the fight for Angolan independent from Portuguese colonial rule. The strike in Baixa do Cassange in 1961 was a major early moment in Angola’s violent and complicated colonial breakup, in which African workers sharpened their machetes—but not for tending to the shrubs. 14 years later, Angola gained independence but also fell into a brutal and protracted civil war. According to a 1985 article by the New York Times, 90 percent of Europeans had fled the country and by 1985, coffee production had crippled to five percent of the colonial time’s figures. After the coffee plantation owners and agronomists fled Angola (most of them to Brazil), the coffee that was grown especially in the country’s lush, green highlands—primarily robusta, which once provided half of the nation’s foreign exchange earnings—quickly went into neglect and became fallow.
Café Cazengo a Pioneer in Coffee Production in Angola
“Café Cazengo started as an idea way before we implemented,” Elba Teresa Albino Jorge dos Santos de Oliveira, the company’s General Manager, tells Sprudge. “In fact, it was already a way of life ingrained in the family before Angola became independent. Our parents were coffee growers, and they made a living producing coffee and selling to the Portuguese in exchange for durable goods and even food.”
Café Cazengo was launched in 2009. The brand pays homage to the place where the first Angolan coffee plant was allegedly placed in the early 1830s (by the Brazilians), and as a way to revive the former glory that the area had in coffee production, with these efforts still visible today. Coffee export was what oil export is to the country today. However, the company needed local support to succeed.
“We couldn’t go alone, so we started forming partnerships with old coffee growers that had stopped harvesting their old plants due to lack of demand,” de Oliveira says. “Today, we are the pioneers in reviving the coffee industry in Angola, in Kwanza Norte province. And for that, we have achieved our goal. Coffee production today has increased dramatically, and we see more and more young people interested in producing coffee as the sales revenues help improve their lives.”
Before the project started, there was minimal coffee with all production coming from coffee trees over 50 years old. The areas where these trees grew were inaccessible, requiring a 4×4 just to reach the growing sites. According to the Oliveira, coffee farmers in Angola still farmed some of these crops for their own personal consumption, and only in very small amounts. Cafe Czengo acquired one of these old farms and started reclaiming the timeworn coffee plants. They did this by hiring young people in the nearby villages and using the older ones to teach them how to tend coffee. As a result, the area saw a huge increase in coffee production–and with it, increased interest from coffee buyers.
Café Cazengo and Coffee Value Addition
Exporting raw coffee beans has been a problem and a drawback in Africa for a long time. To make the project more profitable and sustainable, Café Cazengo started a coffee processing plant for value addition. At its core, Cazengo is a family business, and export was always the original objective, but the ability to process and sell coffees domestically and internationally has been transformative for their vision. They’ve acquired the gear they need to do it—a coffee huller from Brazil, a roast from Portugal, a capsule machine from Italy, and coffee bags from South Africa—and today they’re the only company making capsules (which work in Nespresso machines) in the country of Angola. Their longterm goal is to get into the United States market and grow export opportunities further.
Café Cazengo is considered a medium enterprise in Angola with a production capacity of about 60 tons of roasted coffee annually. To serve society, the company offers original and organic coffee products striving to create the original Angolan coffee taste, dubbing it the “Essence of the Angolan Coffee.”
Today, Café Cazengo offers roasted coffee beans, ground coffee, and coffee capsules. With the global trend of adding original and imaginative flavors to alcoholic products like orange flavor in whiskey and cinnamon flavor in beer, Café Cazengo produces a coffee-flavored beer called Cerveja Cazengo.
Boosting Local Coffee Production and economy, and Encouraging the Youth
Café Cazengo supports local coffee production by sourcing most of its coffee directly from over 500 local smallholder coffee farms. Although they are reviving their acquired old coffee farm, what comes from it is insignificant compared to the demand they are having.
“When we started, our suppliers were old, most of them over 70 years,” Oliveira says. “Young people by then didn’t believe that it was possible to make a living producing coffee. Today, the numbers are different. More young people are getting on board and in fact, the numbers have inverted. [Now] most coffee farmers are young. They have small plots where they grow their coffee, mainly on the back of their houses. The sale of coffee is not a business [to them] but a way to survive and buy goods they can’t produce, mainly industrial goods.” Oliveira tells Sprudge.
Apart from offering ingenious coffee products, the company is creating job opportunities, especially for the young people coming out of universities. Café Cazengo provides a program where young people are given three-month training in its facilities to learn about coffee processing. At the end of the program, these youths get the opportunity to be hired and be part of the cafe’s team. In the future, the company also has a plan to introduce a coffee training academy to elevate Angola coffee production to the next level and continue improving the quality of the coffee that is produced in the country.
The company is also setting up a cooperative for the farmers with the help of a local university. Once the cooperative is in place, the farmers will be organized and in a better position to receive grants from the government and other institutions.
Looking Ahead
In the past, Café Cazengo has attracted recognition from other quarters such as invitations to various events in Washington D.C. by the Angolan embassy, which has prominently recognized the work the company is doing in taking Angola’s name to the world. Currently, the company’s long-term objective is to become Angola’s largest exporter of coffee.
“We believe that Angola can recover its place lost during the long civil war that ravaged the country,” Oliveira tells me. For that happen, further investments are needed into infrastructure, and to draw on R&D being done by other leading coffee countries—in particular, Brazil, with whom the Angolans share a common language. Cazengo’s growth dreams are impressive—and with 1000 hectares set to develop in the short term, these are very promising times for the company, and for Angolan coffee at large. “For us, 2025 is the year,” Oliveira tells me. You can believe him.
Daniel Muraga is an anthropologist and freelance journalist based in Nairobi.