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The Melting Snows of Kilimanjaroby lute wa lutengano I was in this bus traveling to Nairobi from Dar es Salaam. That was a long time ago. Actually it was about 30 years ago. We had left Dar es Salaam at past midnight and were now cruising on that part of the road straddling the Pare Mountains. My mind was concentrating on what we were going to do in Nairobi, which was playing field hockey against other University College teams from Makerere in Uganda and Nairobi, in Kenya. Ours was the University of Dar es Salaam team. As I focused my sight ahead I saw what I first thought was a cloud hanging from the sky. A colleague sitting next to me nudged my side and announced to everybody’s surprise that what we were seeing in the distance as a cloud was actually the snow capped summit of Mount Kilimanjrao. I and several other colleagues in the bus, actually all those who had never physically seen the mountain before, could not believe what we were seeing. I now could understand why the English thought their famous explorer, Henry Morton Stanley, who had wrote back home about the snows of Kilimanjaro under the equator, was a cerebral malaria case. Let it suffice to say that for the following one hour or so our full attention was drawn to the mountain. Everybody was silent and presumably silently paying respect to the mighty mountain. That was a lasting impression to us. And perhaps because of the mountain we went on to win, for the first time, the hockey tournament in Nairobi. The second time I saw the mountain was when I was working with a Tourism company and escorting some European mountain climbers who were attempting to scale it. Again the mountain made me become philosophical about life. This time I went very near it and actually spent some four or five nights at its foot, at Marangu. But out of respect for this spectacular mountain I refused to join the group scaling it. For the next five or so years I visited the foot of the mountain twice or thrice every year. Still I refused to join the groups climbing it. It was only in the late 80s that a close friend of mine convinced me to scale it. And what an experience it was? The mere experience of changing the natural order of life from "you, the mountain, and the sky" when you begin climbing it, to "the mountain, you and the sky" when you reach the summit was spectacular. It was this unique experience which propelled me to climb that mountain for the next three years consecutively. It was only when I felt that my body could not take it anymore that I abandoned what was slowly becoming an addiction. Actually it was at that time when I understood why a group of schoolmates used to go for the climb every year for some ten or so years consecutively. It is an experience which is to say the least quite enriching. What can one make of a one week experience in the African tropics whereby one can go through the tropical rain forests, temperate grasslands, moonlike landscapes and on to the ice glaciers? However this experience may in the near future be confined only to the history books. Because the other day I read an article in an environmental magazine lamenting the prediction that snow on top of that mountain will disappear in about twenty years time. Reason: the environmental degradation and deforestation on the slopes of that majestic mountain and the encroaching global warming. Will some young man ever be able to see the snow capped peak
and be inspired to travel to Nairobi and win a hockey tournament again? Pity!
Nobody seems to comprehend this deplorable situation.
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