Mount Kenya

When Creator Comes Visiting…

…this is one of his domains – the craggy summit of Kere-Nyaga, Mountain of Brightness, better known outside East Africa as Mount Kenya.

And the supreme being concerned is Ngai, maker of earth, the cosmos and everything. And it was to Ngai that the Kikuyu farmers of Mount Kenya’s southerly foothills once offered their sacrifices and prayers. Although they only did this in times of great crisis, since it was generally held that Creator was a remote figure, little concerned with human affairs. When his help was sought, he was addressed as Mwene-Nyaga, possessor of brightness (Jomo Kenyatta, Facing Mount Kenya 1938). Nyaga also has figurative connotations, meaning ostrich, but in this context suggestive of the white plumes of the male ostrich, a visual analogy for the glaciated zones among the dark mountain peaks.

You’ll see the thinking in this next photo:

This shot of a retreating male ostrich also captures a distant view of the Ngong Hills, another landmark of spiritual significance, not least in recent times to Out of Africa writer Karen Blixen and her lover Denys Finch Hatton whose burial place it is. For that story see Caught inside a Kikuyu garden.

I’m sorry I don’t have more and better photos of Mount Kenya. The ones I do have are a little odd, as if the mountain meant to tease by showing off parts of itself at times and in places where it was not expected to be. I remember spotting it early one morning as I stood in the garden of the Outspan Hotel in Nyeri, the jagged summit floating gauzily above the horizon.

For several moments I was fixed to the spot. By the time I thought of taking a photograph it was gone – only empty sky in the place where it was, and a visceral sense of loss. Kilimanjaro just over the border in Tanzania, plays the same trick. Both mountains spend much of their time being mysteriously invisible. Yet there are travellers’ tales that claim occasions when, looking north and south, both mountains appeared simultaneously. Just imagine!

And now for the Mount Kenya photos I do have. The first one was taken from a small plane on our way to Lewa Downs:

This photo was taken beside the Lewa Downs air strip. At the time, it was the two elephants, just visible in the foreground, that caught my eye. It was only when I was scanning the image that I noticed the odd geographical juxtaposition of Mount Kenya’s summit. What are its lofty peaks doing just there, and so sneakily? They are over 17,000 feet high.

And finally a sunset view of Mount Kenya from the neighbouring Aberdares National Park. The Aberdare Range is also one of Creator’s dwelling places when he is checking out earthly doings. Its Kikuyu name is Nyandarua, which I believe means place of the crumpled hide – another interesting metaphor. Here’s an aerial view:

These vivid names for spiritual landscapes remind me that in traditional pre-literate societies, the natural world provided humans with unlimited scope for pondering, creating and observing. Its diverse parts were sources of inspiration and expression, things to think by, a resource for metaphor, analogy, riddles, song, dance and story telling as means for making sense of existence.

Particular mountains, trees, rocks, lakes, chosen as places to make sacrifices or pray to Creator, are gateways to congress with the divine, and so may be taken as sacred in the same way a church is sacred space for a Christian. More broadly, though, all land may be seen as sacred since it was made and given to humans by Creator.

And in this sense, then, there is no divide between spiritual and physical; all states exist in the same plane, which is interesting, if somewhat difficult for some of us to think about. We might call it respect. We might even call it love.

Lens-Artists: Spiritual Sites Tina sets this week’s fascinating theme. Please take a look at her inspriting post.

Clouds over Kenya

This probably is not the kind of scene most people associate with Africa. It looks more like a stretch of bleak English moorland in December. Anyway Kenya it is, and it was taken one August in a Maasai group ranch conservancy, bordering the Maasai Mara National Park.

May to September is East Africa’s winter, and the skies are often overcast and leaden. The nights, and even the days can be chilly. Kenya, anyway, covers many of the world’s climatic zones either horizontally or vertically – from the hot and arid Northern District, bordering Ethiopia and Somalia, to the alpine heights of Mount Kenya with its glacial peaks. There are also the airy, and rarely too hot, highland plains around Nairobi, and the steamy humidity of the Mombasa coastal strip to the south.

Much of the nation’s weather is determined by the cycle of Indian Ocean monsoon winds. These, unless disrupted by El Nino effects, bring two seasons of rain – the long rains in March to May, and the short rains in November-December. In between, many areas receive little or no rain. Western Kenya, however, receives more regular rainfall courtesy of Lake Victoria Nyanza which makes its own weather. Meanwhile in the fertile Central Highlands above Nairobi, altitude and forest combine to make June and July the season of heavy mists. It’s all a bit dreary, but the mist does have its uses – for instance, ripening the maize crops for the August harvest.

Smallholder farms and July mists in the Kikuyu highlands, north of Nairobi

In the late 1990s Team Farrell was often out and about in the Kikuyu highlands, visiting smallholder farms. And the reason we were doing this in the fog season was because the Team Leader, aka Graham, was – besides running an agricultural crop protection project on behalf of Her Majesty’s Government – gathering data for his doctoral thesis on smut. If you want to know more about our smut forays (of the plant variety that is) your can find out more HERE.

Rural road after an unseasonal July downpour. Poor communications embed poverty, making it hard for farmers to get produce to market before it spoils.

Lowering skies over Limuru’s tea gardens with tea pickers’ housing.

Kikuyu farmhouse.

Wintery fields in Muranga where the Del Monte pineapples grow.

And just sometimes, even on the gloomiest Kenyan winter’s day, the sun breaks through the clouds:

Jennifer Nichole Wells OWPC: cloudy Go here for more bloggers’ cloudy offerings.

Misty Mountains of East Africa

Kilimanjaro rising behind the Chyulu Hills, Ukambani, Kenya. Photo taken from the Mombasa Highway during the December short rains.

Mount Kenya from the plane window, looking over the European-owned wheat farms of Laikipia

It is one of history’s bizarre anecdotes, that one of these two old volcanoes was once given away as a birthday present. But before I reveal how this happened, please take a look at the map. Head for the centre.

Here you will see that Tanzania’s Kilimanjaro and Kenya’s Mount Kenya lie pretty much on the same north-south axis, albeit a couple of hundred miles apart. In an earlier post about Denys Finch Hatton’s burial place in the Ngong Hills (to the left of Nairobi on the map) I quoted Karen Blixen’s description of how one sunset, she and Denys had witnessed a simultaneous sighting of Kilimanjaro and Mount Kenya. This must have been something to see, for these mountains can be frustratingly elusive when it comes to showing themselves. One moment you can be looking them full in the face; the next they have dissolved into a clear blue sky as if they were never there. You blink and wonder how this could have possibly happen. It is doubtless a quantum physics thing, but in the absence of more scientific explanations, the phenomenon anyway seems quite mystical. It is not surprising, then, that local people have long regarded these mountains as sacred places that may, from time to time, be visited by the Creator.

But to return to the mountainous birthday gift.

If you look again at the map you will see how the border between Kenya and Tanzania makes a sudden kink to encompass Kilimanjaro. This daft piece of map-making is testimony of a tussle in colonial expansionism (Britain versus Germany) and the kind of queenly megalomania that thought it perfectly reasonable to take possession of someone else’s mountain and then make a gift of it to a fellow monarch, a personage whom she rather despised even though he was a close relative.

I’m sure you will have guessed by now that we are talking of Queen Victoria and Kaiser Wilhelm. One can only presume that someone who also called herself the Empress of India would think nothing of the sharing out of stolen mountains. I dare say she thought it made up for the fact that she had bagged the territories now known as Kenya and Uganda when Wilhelm had wanted them too. Perhaps she also thought that giving Wilhelm the taller of the two would also help to placate him. If she had stopped to consider the fact that Kilimanjaro was only a dormant volcano, she might have had second thoughts. It was altogether too ominous a gift.

In the end the whole land-grabbing deal was ratified in the Heligoland Treaty of 1890, and the map-makers then duly drew a line straight through the middle of Maasai territory coupled with the requisite detour round Kilimanjaro. They called one side British East Africa, and the other German East Africa. Meanwhile the locals, who comprised very many different ethnic communities, were largely unaware how far they had been scrambled, or indeed scrobbled, to borrow a term of dastardly rapine from John Masefield and The Box of Delights. They were soon to find out. On the British side it began with the setting up of forts along the proposed line of rail for the Uganda Railway. This 600-mile line from Mombasa to Lake Victoria would be the means by which the Empress of India would get her troops (mainly Indian ones) swiftly to the source of the Nile. Why she would ever need to do this will have to wait for another post. Suffice it to say that this project was substantially dafter than the giving of mountains as birthday presents. Even at the time people thought so. In Britain they called it the Lunatic Line. In East Africa the invaded called it the Iron Snake.

Glimpse of Kilimanjaro on the flight from Zanzibar to Mombasa

Valentine’s Day Runaway

Friday February 14 1992 was the day I ran away to Africa. I was finally fleeing a marriage with too many guns in the closet, and much else besides. And I was leaving behind home, possessions, an aged father and three much loved labradors. The springer spaniel, though, I would not miss. The little beast was demented and I wished the husband joy of her.

At the time of departure I had very little money, and I had left a legal aid solicitor to handle my divorce. (With guns in the closet I discovered that such matters are swiftly expedited). When I boarded the airport bus in Wolverhampton bound for Heathrow all I had with me was one canvas grip stuffed with some summer clothes, and a small cabin bag containing paperbacks, my Olympus-trip, a mini cassette player and Joni Mitchell’s Night Ride Home. I also had an Air France ticket to Nairobi and a stash of anti-malaria tablets.

Long ago at Mzima Springs – the way I was then…

I was off to be with the man with whom I was smitten, an entomologist working out in Kenya on a three-month contract to control an introduced crop pest, the Larger Grain Borer. I knew little about him, and still less about my destination. Years before, in a frigid Scottish university, I had written a masters thesis on the socio-economic relations between Mbuti hunters and Bantu farmers of the Congo. I had never been to Africa, nor wanted to go there. I had read too much about forest buffaloes, ants and yaws in the Ituri Forest to find the idea appealing. I was not the sort of person who craved adventure or who had travelled much. I was a museum researcher and an armchair anthropologist. When I set off from rural Shropshire on that dank and gloomy day, it was to meet up with the flesh-and-blood man who had sent me the plane ticket. I did not expect to look out of a plane window somewhere over Somalia, and fall in love with a continent.

It was un coup de foudre as the French say. Ludicrous and nerve-shattering. Perhaps I should not have flown Air France, (although with hindsight I have to say it was one of my best flights ever). But as we approached Nairobi the condition only grew worse. It seemed there was a plane jam at Jomo Kenyatta International; the 747 could not land. Instead, it circled and circled Mount Kenya. I could not believe it: this god’s eye view of the vast exploded volcano presented to me again, again, and again. Then, as a final flourish to this extraordinary entrée, we made our descent over the green highlands of Kikuyuland, the smallholder farms so lush from the short rains.

Those landscapes fused onto my retina, bedded in my cerebral cortex, and I was changed.

My man in Mombasa – the way he was then…

When I finally met G at the airport, he seemed like a stranger. I noticed that his hair needed cutting and he was wearing a short-sleeved shirt with an oddly tropical look, this when I had only known him in the thick jumpers and anoraks so essential for surviving winter in rural Shropshire. It was a disquieting discovery to see that I did not know him at all in this landscape. As he drove me into the city I gazed out at the plains bush country around the airport, found myself blinking at the crowds and traffic chaos in downtown Nairobi. Someone had turned the colours up: it was all too bright, the road reserves dazzling with pink bougainvillaea, yellow cassia trees; the bright clothes and brown faces, the white smiles. When I arrived at the Jacaranda Hotel in Westlands I was still in tourist mode. I thought I had come to Kenya for a couple of months at most. Neither of us could have guessed that we would not live again in England for another eight years, or that our Africa journey had only just begun. And so yes, to thieve a line from Ms Brontë, and one so apt for this Valentine’s occasion – “Reader, I married him”; I married the man who bought me a plane ticket to Africa. How could I not?