No Hurry in Africa by Brendan Clerkin

Author:Brendan Clerkin [clerkin, brendan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-906018-34-4
Publisher: Original Writing

CHAPTER 13

NO PICNIC ON MOUNT KILIMANJARO

VERY MANY AFRICANS, including many who live within sight of the mighty Kilimanjaro, have never experienced snow close up. Mwangangi was one of them.

‘Brendan, you know when your house is covered in snow in Ireland… well, how do you breathe?’ he asked, when I told him that I would be climbing Mount Kilimanjaro soon.

I assured him it was not a problem. It might be more of a problem near the top of Kilimanjaro however, at nearly 20,000 feet.

In the ancient world, the Greek geographer Ptolemy included a mountain of snow in one of his maps roughly coinciding to Mount Kilimanjaro’s location. The ancient Greeks were known to trade along the East African coast, and may have heard stories of its existence. The Romans even surmised a mountain such as Mount Kilimanjaro would have to exist as the source of the Nile, though of course this theory was proved to be inaccurate in the nineteenth century. It was not until the 1840s that a missionary named Johannes Rebmann was the first white person to set eyes on Mount Kilimanjaro, back in 1848. The Royal Geographical Society in London refused to believe his tale of snow so near the equator.

It was not until 1897 that Mount Kilimanjaro was finally conquered for the first time, by the German explorer, Hans Meyer, and his local Chagga tribe guide, John Lauwo. Germans played a large part in exploring this area. The map of Kenya had to be redrawn when the mountain was ceded to the then German colony of Tanganyika by the British at the behest of Queen Victoria; she had made a present of it to her grandson the Kaiser. With its permanent icing of snow, it did look a bit like a birthday cake, I suppose. A celebration was held in 1997 marking the centenary of the first ascent. The guest of honour was none other than John Lauwo, who was by then 118 years old.

Around the beginning of March, I joined a group of ten Irish people on a climb of Africa’s highest mountain, hoping to emulate the feat of Meyer and Lauwo. I met up with the ten in Nairobi, a motley crew of all ages from north and south of the Border. An Irish Army officer named Dermot would be leading the group on the climb. He was a veteran of UN peacekeeping assignments. Among our group of ten was a gentleman named Pat Close, an engaging character in his sixtieth year who had been a teacher alongside an uncle of mine at a school in the Glens of Antrim before they both retired, yet another person whom I encountered in Africa that was known to a member of my family.

They were raising money on behalf of a Cork-based charity called Childaid, who were supporting a variety of health and education projects in Kenya and Tanzania. For the first couple of days, we were taken to see Childaid’s activities on the ground. In the sub-dickensian smelly slum of Mukuru, they were amazed by the resilience and good humour of the children in school.

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