By the nineteenth century, the peoples of Kilimanjaro had developed a highly successful system of intensive agriculture, one that enabled them to prosper and grow significantly in size. Around 100,000 people lived on the slopes of the mountain by 1850, spread across more than forty mountain ridges. The period brought many changes to the mountain. It experienced a dramatic rise in trade with peoples from beyond the mountain, particularly Swahili long-distance traders. The growing importance of this trade fueled the rise of chieftaincy and the increasingly assertive power of the wamangi. It also led to a rise in warfare on the mountain, pitting rival chieftaincies against one another and forcing weaker chiefdoms on the mountain to either forge alliances or accept subordination.
Despite this trend toward political centralization, the management of water remained decentralized. Wamangi asserted little authority over water until the colonial period. This reflects the mountain’s multiple-source water economy, in which people relied on a diversity of water resources rather than a single one that could be easily monopolized. It also indicates the extent to which water management empowered a wide range of people in the community, from rainmakers to canal specialists, from men to women, from elders to children. Management of the resource was widely distributed, and widely shared, relying on a web of intersecting knowledge. At the heart of this knowledge was a shared heritage among the people and the belief that the mountain was the source of life.
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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