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PFUNDA TEA
COMPANY LTD
~Amar Pal Singh Shaw
Former General Manager, Pfunda Tea Company
I
n a few hundred words I shall endeavour to convey the
achievements, emotions, associations experienced over a
decade and give the reader a glimpse of what Pfunda was at
the time of privatisation and what it is today – one of the finest
estates in Africa.
My wife (Manjeet) and I landed at Kigali International Airport
on 31 October 2004. Our knowledge of Rwanda being limited to
the BBC news coverage of the 1994 genocide, we did not really
know what to expect. We were warmly welcomed by the young
Immigration Officer at the airport, and informed that Rwanda
was the most beautiful country in Africa, if not in the world.
Having spent the night at the Hotel Des Mille Colleens, of
‘Hotel Rwanda’ fame, we motored to Pfunda, which lies below
the Nyiragongo volcano and above Lake Kivu, in an area known
as the Congo-Nile Crest, in the Western Province. The road
meandered along valleys, ridges and crests, bringing into view
the hillsides covered with ‘patchwork quilt’
fields.We
understood
what the Immigration Officer had said about Rwanda’s scenic
beauty and why ‘The Land of aThousand Hills’ is often referred
to as ‘the Switzerland of Africa’. We reached Pfunda at around
11 AM, after a three-hour drive. Mr Evariste Bizimana, the
Manager of Pfunda, received us and showed us around the
factory and its ancillary buildings which were in a state of
complete disrepair – with corroded roofing sheets weighed down
by boulders to keep them in place. I thought, “What have I got
myself into?”The CTC rollers made loud grinding noises, the
dryer fans were howling away – the noise level in the factory was
cacophonic. In the one and a half hours that we were in the
factory the processing had to be stopped thrice due to machines
breaking down. I spied a worker dart behind the store house to
relieve himself and realised why the factory premises had an
overwhelming ammonia-like odour.There were no proper toilets
and washrooms. The only good thing about the factory was its
basic structure – it had been built to last.
The next day, Mr Bizimana and Mr Come De Gaulle, the Head
of Plantation, took me around the tea fields. Pfunda’s tea area
totalling 884.67 Ha (BI, belonging to the factory: 106.49 Ha
and TV, belonging to small farmers’ cooperative: 778.18 Ha) is
spread over seven sectors: Pfunda, Gahembe, Kigeyo, Cyabarera,
Nyabirasi, Kagera and Nyamugali.The altitude ranges from 1700
metres to 2200 metres. There were signs that the planting, first
carried out in 1965, had been done very scientifically, with a
proper drainage system. Now the drains were choked, with water
backing up into the tea area; tea bushes under plucking had been
allowed to grow to over 1.5 metres in height; pruning was on a
4-year cycle and bushes were chopped down to between 20 cm
and 25 cm. Green leaf weighing sheds were falling apart, and
the bridges were broken and unmotorable. However, looking at
the tea fields I felt that there was only one way that Pfunda was
going and that was upwards.
Standing in the Gahembe sector office looking into the distance,
I once again marvelled at the beauty of the countryside,
amplified by the crispness of the air and the clarity of the light.
JULY 2015 19
A Panoramic View