16-07-2025
African tea estates planted by Scots named as world heritage sites
At the turn of the 20th century, planters with seedlings from Edinburgh would have crawled among the sacred trees and waterfalls of Malawi's towering Mount Mulanje, establishing Africa's first commercial tea plantations.
Tea from Mulanje can still be bought in the UK. It is a remnant of a colonial history of industrious — and brutal — Scottish planters and Presbyterian missionaries, whose legacy in the area includes the name of Malawi's second city, Blantyre.
The region now carries an added significance. The Mount Mulanje cultural landscape was recently designated a world heritage site — one of five new sites in Africa named by Unesco as annual committee meetings ended in Paris.
'Revered as a sacred place inhabited by gods, spirits, and ancestors, [Mulanje] holds deep cultural and spiritual significance,' the Unesco inscription reads. 'The mountain's geological and hydrological features are connected with the belief systems and cultural practices of the Yao, Mang'anja, and Lhomwe peoples.'
The number of African world heritage sites has boomed in recent years, from just a few in 1978 when the list began, to 93 in 2018 and 112 as of this week.
Unesco also awarded the prestigious designation to the Diy-Gid-Biy cultural landscape of Cameroon's Mandara mountains, the coastal and marine ecosystems of Guinea-Bissau's Bijagós archipelago — Omatí Minhô, and the Gola-Tiwai complex in Sierra Leone. It also extended the designation from South Africa's iSimangaliso Wetland Park into Mozambique's Maputo National Park.
Complex colonial histories linger at many Unesco sites in Africa, where European powers had a footprint for hundreds of years and maintain historical ties.
This can have a stark symbolism, such as the dramatic degradation of world heritage sites linked to French history in Senegal, which is among the many West African countries now distancing themselves from their former colonial masters.
• French rediscover their love of tea — and want to supply Britain
Traces of British influence also remain in Sierra Leone, which was established as a colony for freed slaves in 1808 and was the main base for the Royal Navy's West Africa Squadron, which was pivotal in anti-slaving operations.
Sierra Leone's Gola-Tiwai complex is a biodiversity hotspot, hosting more than 1,000 plant species and 55 mammals. According to Unesco, 19 of the mammal species are globally threatened, including key species such as the pygmy hippopotamuses of recent viral video fame.
British naturalists such as Henry Smeathman were dispatched to Sierra Leone as early as 1771, and the area that is now the Gola Rainforest National Park — part of the new Unesco site — was commercially logged under the colonial administration.
