Referred to by locals as one of the ‘gateways’ to Kilimanjaro, the town of Mwika has a centuries-long history of coffee. First brought to Tanzania by Germans to a place called Kaleme Church in 1835, a man named Zebadoya who was rewarded for his service to the Church with a charter to plant coffee—which he brought back home to Mwika. Though he was technically the only person the Church authorized to plant coffee in that area, coffee started sprouting in the gardens of Zebadoya’s friends, family and neighbors. As the population grew in the 1900s, so too did help for increasingly bigger harvests. Workers brought cherry back to their homes and planted it, too, spreading the coffee further to Kilimanjaro.