Bongani

Kamal Moukheiber, Lebanese by birth and a graduate of HEC Paris, spent fifteen years in investment banking in London — Credit Suisse, Lehman Brothers — before settling in Maputo in 2013 for a property project. The idea came to him in a café in the capital, watching customers smoke: Africa grows tobacco and rolls none of it.

The first cigar came out in December 2016. Moukheiber brought in a Dominican master cigar maker, formerly at General Cigar on Macanudo, to train Mozambican rollers; the first class graduated in 2017 and a second is in training. The workshop, in Maputo's Baixa district, turns out some ten thousand cigars a month, and a new factory is being built in a free zone.

The tobacco is grown in Mozambique by contract farmers, from Dominican seed. The wrapper comes from Cameroon — which this atlas holds as a wrapper-growing country — and the cigars age in cedarwood sheets from Ghana. The house sells in Mozambique, South Africa, Kenya, Nigeria, Congo and Côte d'Ivoire, whose addresses this atlas holds.

Bongani is often called the first "fully African" cigar. Its founder does not say so: he claims a selection driven by quality, from Africa and elsewhere, and the filler mixes African and non-African tobaccos. The name itself means "be grateful" in Zulu.

Range Depth

• Robusto

  Wrapper Cameroon

  Five inches on a 50 ring.

• 458 Toro

  Wrapper Cameroon

  Six inches on a 58 ring.

• Gordo

  Wrapper Cameroon

  Four inches on a 58 ring: short and thick.