Climbing Kilimanjaro With Africa's Top Guide (eBook)

Chapter Two

A Brief History of Kilimanjaro and East Africa

Mawenzi from the top of Kilimanjaro and the East African Plains.

Most books about East Africa start with the history of Kilimanjaro, usually delivered from a Western viewpoint. This is misleading, sometimes even disrespectful, so I’m going to start with a different approach, by telling you what it was like when I traveled to England and the U.S. in 2010. You’ll see that my experiences, if presented as those of a “discoverer” rather than a visitor, can seem pretty comical.

I may have been the first person from where I live, a busy city of 200,000 people called Moshi, to visit Disneyland, and I’ll admit I was amazed. When I was young, I lived in a traditional beehive hut that was made from mud and sticks and had a thatched roof, so going on the Pirates of the Caribbean ride was a pretty dramatic cultural change for me! In fact, when I went home, I was a bit of a celebrity. Groups of people would ask me to tell them about my trip. Some of the things I saw and experienced were hard to explain.

Likewise, you may have a hard time getting your friends and family to fully understand your experiences when you return from Tanzania. I had to do what you will probably do: I showed them photographs. When I told people about Disneyland, many friends and family did not believe me at first. But when I shared photos, they simply said, “We will be quiet now.” They were genuinely amazed.

The history of Kilimanjaro is like this, in that very much depends on perspective. As I said, I was possibly the first person from Moshi to visit Disneyland, but I didn’t discover it. It was there before I arrived. The same was true of Kilimanjaro—it was there long before explorers from Europe arrived. The Chagga were already here, too, and we had a thriving culture. European travelers were really just coming back to where their ancestors had come from.

With that in mind, here is a better way to think about the history of Kilimanjaro.

Most of the guides and porters are Chagga. Guides are required to speak English; this is a rule set by the government department that runs climbing here, at Mount Kilimanjaro National Park. When you hear us speak to each other, we generally speak Chagga or Swahili. Some guides speak French, German, and Spanish, but not many. Roughly half the people in Tanzania speak some English. About two-thirds speak a tribal language, but Swahili is our official national language, and it’s one of the main things that unites us as a country.

Bantu was the original language of the people of Central Africa. People don’t speak this language much anymore, but Swahili is a descendent of the Bantu and Arabic languages. It’s a universal language spoken today by many people in countries throughout East Africa. Learning a few words and phrases in Swahili will make your trip more enjoyable.

When you meet someone on the trail, you will usually be greeted by “Jambo!”—which basically means hello. You’ll start using it yourself, and you’ll find that people warm to you quickly when you use this simple greeting. The answer is usually the same: “Jambo” in return. If you wish to ask how they are, simply say “Habari?” If they are well, they might answer “Nuzri,” which means good, or they’ll say “Hakuna matata” if they are doing really great. This means “no troubles.” See? You are well on your way to meeting and talking to people on the trail.

But Swahili is much more than just a language. It also defines an ancient culture that dates back to the origins of human civilization as it existed around Kilimanjaro and the coast of East Africa. Long before invaders from other places began to come here, the Swahili culture of towns and villages had created well-established trading routes that went deep into Africa and out to the coast of what is now Zanzibar, a part of modern-day Tanzania. This is often referred to as the Golden Age of Swahili civilization. Early travelers described major Swahili cities as being some of the finest and most advanced in the world. Our culture pre-dates European and Western ones by a very long time.

The real truth is that Africans went on to discover and settle the rest of the world, not the other way around. Our ancestors were the founders of the great civilizations that came into existence along the way. When travelers from here got to Europe and settled that area, people later descended into religious superstition, fear, ignorance and violence for hundreds of years. This period is what is now called the Dark Ages in Europe. Knowledge, science, civility and history had been forgotten for a very long time when humans began to emerge from the Dark Ages. Over time, people slowly began to return to science, education and enlightenment.

They also started to go back to the places that they had come from, but they had forgotten their own history. They now saw Africa as a new land to be conquered, using their newfound weapons and lingering superstitious beliefs. These were actually the ancestorial lands from where all people had originally come, many tens of thousands of years before. The people who had remained in Africa had not developed the types of weapons that were invented during the Dark Ages in Europe, and then used during the 500 years of religious wars in Europe and the Middle East called the Crusades. This set the stage for the colonial period in East Africa and much of the rest of the world.

Western invaders initiated the slave trade in the 16th century, a very sad chapter in human history. They also tried to erase our culture and language. Families were torn apart and many never saw their relatives again. The Swahili-speaking people of different tribes resisted and fought the invaders for many years. These wars to regain our independence went on for a long time. In the end, we became a free and independent people once again in 1964. The countries called Tanganyika and Zanzibar were reunited and became what we call Tanzania today.

Some of the older people here still harbor resentment from earlier times, and although most of the younger generation did not have any personal experience with that period, they are very aware of our history. During the period of German rule in this part of Africa—which lasted from the late 1800s until the end of World War I—there were efforts by missionaries to erase our culture and our language, and leaders of clans were executed. Many had their heads cut off. Terrible things happened to our people, most of which are far too brutal to mention here.

The British later controlled Tanzania—from the end of World War I into the early 1960s—and it was still difficult to endure being an occupied country. Guidebooks will tell you that we were a people discovered by westerners. This is untrue and deeply insulting. It is false history.

I share this with you because the era of colonialism is a very unpleasant subject for Tanzanians. We, our lands, and our mountains were not “discovered” by foreigners. Africans have always been here, and in fact my ancestors discovered the rest of the world during an era lasting tens of thousands of years. Please be respectful of this when you visit Tanzania. It is considered rude to do otherwise. Most younger people today are happy to live in a free country and do not dwell on the history of the colonial period, but I hope you know and understand that it was a very bad time for Tanzanians.

Many of the Chagga people here are Christian or Muslim. Missionaries came in 1848, but these faiths from other places are not the only beliefs practiced here. More than half of us still believe on Ghost, or what you may think of as God, a deity that predates Christianity and most other world religions by many tens of thousands of years. Today, the religious leaders of our pre-Christian and pre-Muslim customs are usually older people in Chagga society. They are very important to us.

When community disasters occur—for example, major fires that broke out on Kilimanjaro in 1997—tribal elders went to a place called Kifunika Hill, a small, inactive volcano on the slopes of Kilimanjaro that is sacred to the Chagga. The elders and most of us believe that Ghost lives on the summit of Kilimanjaro. They pray, offer animal sacrifices—of goats, sheep, and cows—and ask Ghost for rain. If you climb the Marangu Route up Kilimanjaro, you will pass Kifunika Hill along the way. Many visitors say they can sense that this to be a deeply spiritual place when they pass by.

Even though climbing and tourism are an important part of our local economy, Kilimanjaro is even more important as a part of our cultural and religious history. Please remember that the mountain is a holy place to us.

Religion is important to people in Tanzania, just as it is in other cultures and countries. But here, we also believe in the words of our national motto: Unity is the Power. Christians and Muslims here are like brothers and sisters, and in most communities we have churches and mosques both, standing side by side. Some families have both Muslim and Christian members, and no one thinks anything of it.

We are a nation of many tribes and religions, and we find that unity really is the power in Tanzania. This is why we adopted a common language for all tribes, and it’s one of the many ways we have found our strength as a...