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The Mountains of Jagga

Encountering Africa’s Olympus in the Nineteenth Century

ON MAY 11, 1848, Johannes Rebmann of the Church Missionary Society became the first European to see Kilimanjaro. A mere two weeks earlier, most Westerners had regarded the mountain as a legend, a supposed Ethiopian Olympus, a white-capped mountain of gold and silver reaching beyond the clouds. Inspired by tales of this fabled place, Rebmann set out from Mombasa with a guide and a small caravan across the harsh terrain of the steppe. In his journal, he described the radically shifting landscape as they approached the peak:

We crossed the river Lumi at seven in the morning. The nearer we approached the mountains of Jagga the richer was the vegetation; here and there we met with large and magnificent trees, such as I had not seen since I left the coast, till at last we entered a noble valley, thickly grown over with grass which reached up to our middle. Abundant pasture-land for thousands of cattle! Oh, what a noble country has God reserved for his people!¹

In the eyes of Rebmann, the mountain seemed a God-given place, a Garden of Eden lying in stark contrast to its surroundings. Especially surprising to him was the peak’s white layer:

I fancied I saw the summit of one of them covered with a dazzling white cloud. My guide called the white which I saw, merely “Beredi,” cold; it was perfectly clear to me, however, that it could be nothing else but snow.

Rebmann’s discoveries, shared through his published letters and journal excerpts, generated curiosity and skepticism throughout Britain.² Many dismissed his sightings as fantasy, hallucinations resulting from tropical fever. Nonetheless, they brought the mysterious African peak into the Western consciousness and inspired a generation of adventurers to conquer it for themselves.

Rebmann’s expedition reflected a period when the communities of Kilimanjaro came into increasing contact with peoples from beyond the mountain. Never an isolated island, the mountain had long been tied to other parts of the region, and trade between mountain peoples and neighboring societies was a regular occurrence. In the nineteenth century, new players emerged on the scene: traders from more distant parts of the steppe, Swahili caravans from the coast, and European missionaries and adventurers. These outsiders brought new opportunities for trade as well as their own perspectives of the mountain and its waterscapes. Though in many ways different from one another, they shared the common experience of encountering the mountain as an oasis. They defined it as a singular space in opposition to its surroundings, an island of lushness in a sea of aridity. In turn, they considered the inhabitants of this singular space as a singular people. While the massive size of the mountain marked the physical space, it was water (the mysterious snows and the abundance of rivers, streams, and vegetation) that came to define it.

The outsiders who encountered Kilimanjaro in the nineteenth century developed impressions of the waterscape that were very different from those held by the local populations. This owes much to the nature of encounter. Most traders and explorers came to the mountain using the same routes and traveling at the same times of year. These journeys were often arduous; hardships ranged from disease and wild animals to lack of water. The mountain, with its green hills and numerous rivers and streams, emerged as an oasis amid the steppe. African traders saw the mountain as a distinctive place, important in trade and possessing spiritual or mystical significance, but nothing radically out of the ordinary. Europeans, however, developed highly romanticized, idealized visions of Kilimanjaro. At first a fabled Ethiopian Mount Olympus, it was later described as an otherworldly space, an Eden in the heart of Africa. The core of such imageries was water, which gave the place a fecundity and lushness that was absent in the rest of East Africa and comparable to European locales such as the Swiss Alps and Devonshire.

The way in which Europeans imagined Kilimanjaro indicates not only the importance of the oasis encounter, but also the broader cultural constructs that informed European expectations of Africa. Scholars such as Edward Said and Benedict Anderson have shown the importance of “imagined geographies” in shaping how Europeans have made sense of non-Western spaces and peoples.³ With Kilimanjaro, we see a physical space that was imagined through the intersection of two elements: culturally produced archetypes and intense experiences of encounter. The first written accounts of the mountain to circulate in Europe created an image that was the product of the initial explorers’ culturally ingrained expectations of Africa encountering a space that defied these expectations. The mountain, standing in stark contrast to both its immediate surroundings and prevailing archetypes, became viewed as miraculous and symbolic, described in romanticized terms. The waterscape defined the essence of the region’s presumed otherworldliness. With abundant water and mysterious snows, the mountain could service a number of agendas: religious, scientific, and colonial. The waterscapes these explorers produced lacked the nuance of that held by locals, who knew all too well that the waters could be precarious and needed careful management. This occurred because the explorers encountered the mountain as a snapshot, seeing only small parts for limited durations at only certain times of the year. They missed out on the political and environmental dynamism at play. Images of an Edenesque Kilimanjaro, a waterscape of unending abundance, proved resilient despite clear evidence to the contrary, and they shaped the initial period of colonization.

KILIMANJARO AND ITS NEIGHBORS

Though often represented as an “island,” Kilimanjaro has a long history of connectivity with neighboring areas. A dearth of surviving sources from Africa’s early history has made this difficult to document in specific terms. Nonetheless, we can trace ties between the mountain and neighboring areas using historical linguistics, oral narratives, and archeology. After 1850, documentary sources become more widely available, particularly the writings of European explorers. From these records, it is possible to piece together the relationship between the communities of Kilimanjaro and their neighbors, and how these outsiders made sense of the mountain and its waterscapes.

The clearest linkages can be found with the peoples residing on the other “islands” of the region: Mount Meru, the Taita Hills, and the Pare Mountains. These highland areas are closer to Kilimanjaro than the far reaches of mountain settlement—Siha and Rombo—are to one another. The peoples of these areas—the Meru, the Dwaida, the Gweno, the Pare, and others—shared close common descent with the peoples of Kilimanjaro.⁴ They also shared many living patterns. All resided on well-watered lands at similar altitudes, were primarily agricultural, grew similar crops in home gardens, and kept livestock in stalls. They also held similar forms of social organization, living in clusters of homesteads along ridges and identifying with the clan. The Meru, Taita, and Pare even constructed irrigation canals, though on a smaller scale than on Kilimanjaro.⁵ By the nineteenth century, many of these communities had ties to Kilimanjaro through trade. It is likely, for example, that much of the raw iron used by blacksmiths on the mountain came from Pare.⁶

How might these groups have viewed the waters of Kilimanjaro? Given their shared descent, common experience of mountainside living, and deep cultural similarities with the peoples of Kilimanjaro, these communities—particularly North Pare, the closest highland community—likely found the region’s features familiar. Michael Sheridan’s work on the Usangi area of North Pare shows not only how its water management bears striking similarity to that of Kilimanjaro, but also how irrigation networks shared symbolic similarities with the human body and human fertility, similar to the dichotomy of water as blood and land as body, discussed in chapter 1.⁷ Thus, neighboring mountain peoples would have seen Kilimanjaro as a lived space very similar to their own, and its significance would have been understood in terms of cultural connectivity and trade ties. It also seems likely that these groups would have acknowledged the diversity of the mountain’s physical space as well as its population.

Aside from mountain farmers, the Kilimanjaro region has also long been home to seminomadic peoples who have resided on the steppe. The earliest were Khoisan hunter-gatherers, followed by Cushitic and Nilotic pastoralists.⁸ Most are no longer in existence, having either migrated away or assimilated into other groups, and very little is known of them. By the 1850s, the Maasai had emerged as the largest community in the steppe. In many ways, they could hardly be more different from the peoples of Kilimanjaro. They were Nilotic speakers, they practiced pastoralism and limited crop cultivation, and they organized themselves into bands rather than clans. Most of all, they lived in the lowlands, known for its absence of water. As Wimmelbücker notes, by the nineteenth century, those on the mountain considered the Maasai as “prototypes of the foe.”⁹ This stemmed in part from their frequent incursions on the mountain aimed at seizing cattle and other goods. Yet as he and others have noted, the relationship was considerably more nuanced. Maasai peacefully frequented mountain markets to exchange goods including salt, milk, and meat for wood, bananas, yams, honey, and other foodstuffs. People also passed between the two, such as prisoners taken in fighting and women of marrying age. It is likely that some social and cultural practices, such as age-sets, passed into mountain society from the Maasai. In the words of Nurse, the relationship was more akin to love-hate than strictly negative.¹⁰

As seminomadic peoples, Maasai depended on surface water to support themselves and their cattle, and those living near Kilimanjaro recognized the mountain as the source of the rivers and streams on which they depended. These water sources not only provided a needed resource but also served as pathways guiding them to the mountain’s chiefdoms. Maasai may have considered the mountain’s white peak to be its distinguishing feature. Rebmann claims that those he encountered called it Ol Donyo Eibor, meaning “White Mountain” in the Maa language.¹¹ Maasai had no familiarity with ice in the 1850s and therefore would only have recognized the peak as distinctive by its coloration. It is also possible that “white” refers to the cloud patterns that leave the peak obscured for much of day. In either case, the white peak clearly would have marked the mountain as different from others in the steppe. Some have also speculated that Maa is the source of the term “Kilimanjaro.” In his 1893 memoir, Catholic missionary Alexandre Le Roy claimed that several children in Taveta told him that the Maa word for water is ngaro and that they refer to the mountain as the “Mountain of Water” because all the rivers rise from it.¹² However, this is questionable given that there is no word in Maa approximating “Kilima.”

These surrounding communities, though distinct from one another, all had a long-standing connection with the peoples of Kilimanjaro through cultural ties, trade, and warfare. The Bantu communities came from similar alpine spaces and did not endure especially long journeys en route. The Maasai dwelt in the lowlands, the very space that mountain peoples deemed harmful, and thus would not have seen the mountain as a superior space but as only different in its features. Though not encountered as an oasis, Kilimanjaro did serve as a focal point for communities living in its shadows.

African communities from farther afield came into contact with Kilimanjaro as well. Given its tremendous size and its abundance of water, it has been part of regional trade networks for centuries. At the start of the nineteenth century, Kilimanjaro emerged as a center of regional trade, largely because of the rising value of ivory. Between the 1820s and the 1890s, prices for ivory at Zanzibar increased by roughly sixfold.¹³ This precipitated a massive growth in ivory trading that eventually connected areas of the interior as far inland as central Kenya and the Great Lakes with the coastal ports of Mombasa and Pangani as well as Zanzibar. Initially, most traders that reached Kilimanjaro were from groups such as the Giryama, the Digo, the Shambaa, and the Kamba.¹⁴ For them the mountain served two purposes: a place to secure water and provisions for the continued journey and a place to purchase ivory from local hunters.