Anders Bekeken

100 Places To Remember: Mount Kilimanjaro, Tanzania

White Snows in the House of God. When Ernest Hemingways novel The Snows of Kilimanjaro was published in 1936, it made the snow-capped East African mountain famous and turned it into a legend.

For the local Masai tribes living on the plains beneath it, the mountain had already been a living legend for centuries. To them, it is Ngàja Ngái The House of God.

Seen from the plains below, Kilimanjaros peak emerges from a ring of fog and cloud that shrouds its forest-covered lower slopes. When Hemingway first described the mountain, its snow-cap was already melting slowly. Between 1912 and 2003, climate change led to the loss of about 80% of its ice fields, and the remainder of the snow-cap is expected to disappear by 2020.

In itself, the loss of the snow on top of Kilimanjaro will have a limited effect on the ecosystem, as it feeds only a few minor brooks. However, the symbolic effect will be enormous, as an illustration of the speed at which the global climate is changing.

Further down the mountain, the heavy clouds whose vapour and precipitation irrigate the Cloud Forests and feed the rivers have already diminished, due to the rise in temperatures and decrease in atmospheric moisture. This trend is projected to continue and has already increased the frequency of forest fires.

Combined with human-induced deforestation, it will further reduce precipitation. This would have a devastating effect on the woodland, as well as the water supply for the million people of the Chagga and Masai tribes who inhabit the flanks of Kilimanjaro.

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