Doctor Hans Meyer and the First Summit of Kilimanjaro
From Mary Kingsley we move to Doctor Hans Meyer, mainly because he did one thing and one thing only, and that was to mount the first successful summit of Mount Kilimanjaro.
The existence of a snow-capped peak in central Africa was first noted and reported on by German missionary Johannes Rebmann, who published news of this extraordinary discovery in Church Missionary Intelligencer in May 1849. It was roundly dismissed as fantasy, however, and in fact the British Royal Geographic Society, which usually delivered the last word on any matter of geography or exploration, dismissed it as utterly impossible. Snow and ice could not occur at the equator.
And yet it did, and as other explorers confirmed the fact that Mount Kilima Njaro (White Mountain) did indeed exist, the Royal Geographic Society was forced to amend its opinion.
Discovering a great mountain, however, is usually just a precursor to someone climbing it, and it certainly was not long before European mountaineers were on the slopes of Kilimanjaro, and attempting to achieve its highest point.
By the 1880s, Kilimanjaro was established in the German territory of Tanganyika, so the first summit would obviously be a German prerogative. There were several attempts, but in the end, it was 31-year-old German geographer and geologist Hans Meyer who finally succeeded.
As a mountaineering feat, the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro does not really rank among the greatest, since Kili, as it is known only to those who have summited it, does not contain any real technical challenges. It is simply the altitude, almost 20,000ft, the defines its challenge, although in 1889, when Hans Meyer mounted his third, and only successful attempt, it was also a question of mounting an expedition into a region of Africa as yet rarely visited, and to then mount another to assault the summit.
With typical Teutonic precision, the expedition of September/October 1889 was expertly organized, utilizing local guides and porters, with Meyer and his companion Ludwig Purtscheller the only Europeans. It was on Purtscheller’s 40th birthday, October 6, 1889, that the two men finally reached the summit, which they named Kaiser Wilhelm Spitze, in honour of the German monarch.
However, on the evening of December 9, 1961, Tanzanian military officer Lieutenant Alex Nyirenda, planted the flag of independent Tanganyika on the summit, renaming it Uhuru Peak. Uhuru, in idiomatic Swahili, means ‘Freedom’.