Kilimanjaro Mountain

About Mount Kilimanjaro.

Mount Kilimanjaro or just Kilimanjaro with its three volcanic cones Kibo, Mawenzi, and Shira, is a dormant volcano in Tanzania. It is the highest mountain in Africa and the highest single free-standing mountain in the world, with its summit of 5,895 metres (19,341 ft) above sea level and at about 4,900 metres (16,100 ft) high from its plateau base.
Kilimanjaro is also the fourth most topographically prominent peak on Earth. The first people known to have reached the summit of the mountain were Hans Meyer and Ludwig Purtscheller, in 1889. The mountain is part of Kilimanjaro National Park and is a major climbing destination. Because of its shrinking glaciers and disappearing ice fields, the mountain has been the subject of many scientific studies

ORIGIN OF KILIMANJARO

The origin of the name Kilimanjaro is not known, but a number of theories exist. European explorers had adopted the name by 1860 and reported that Kilimanjaro was the mountain's Swahili name. The 1907 edition of The Nuttall Encyclopedia also records the name of the mountain as Kilima-Njaro.
Johann Ludwig Krapf wrote in 1860 that Swahilis along the coast called the mountain Kilimanjaro. Although he did not offer any support. he claimed that Kilimanjaro meant either mountain of greatness or mountain of caravans. Under the latter meaning, kilima meant mountain and jaro meant caravans. Jim Thompson claimed in 1885, again without support. that the term Kilima-Njaro "has generally been understood to mean" the mountain (kilima) of greatness (njaro). He also suggested "though not improbably it may mean" the white mountain.
Njaro is an ancient Kiswahili word for shining. Similarly, Krapf wrote that a chief of the wakamba people whom he visited in 1849, "had been to Jagga and had seen the Kima jajeu, mountain of whiteness, the name given by the Wakamba to Kilimanjaro. More correctly in the Kikamba language this would be kiima kyeu, and this possible derivation has been popular with several investigators.
Others have assumed that kilima is Kiswahili for mountain. The problem with this assumption is that kilima actually means hill and is, therefore, the diminutive of mlima, the proper Kiswahili word for mountain. However, that an early European visitor, whose knowledge of [Kiswahili] was not extensive, changed mlima to kilima by analogy with the two Wachagga names: Kibo and Kimawenzi. A different approach is to assume that the kileman part of Kilimanjaro comes from the Kichagga kileme, which means that which defeats, or kilelema, which means that which has become difficult or impossible. The jaro part would "then be derived from njaare, a bird; or, according to other informants, a leopard; or, possibly from jyaro, a caravan". Considering that the name Kilimanjaro has never been current among the Wachagga people, it is possible that the name was derived from Wachagga saying that the mountain was unclimbable, kilemanjaare or kilemajyaro, and porters misinterpreting this as being the name of the mountain.
In the 1880s, the mountain became a part of German East Africa and was called Kilima-Ndscharo in German following the Kiswahili name components. On 6 October 1889, Hans Meyer reached the highest summit on the crater ridge of Kibo. He named it Kaiser-Wilhelm-Spitze (Kaiser Wilhelm peak). That name was used until Tanzania was formed in 1964. when the summit was renamed Uhuru Peak, meaning freedom peak in Kiswahili.

Who was the first person to climb Mountain Kilimanjaro

History remembers Hans Meyer as the first person to reach Kilimanjaro’s summit in 1889, but some accounts award the title to another man: Yohana Kinyala Lauwo.
In 1889, when Hans Meyer came to the villages surrounding Kilimanjaro, searching for a guide, Yohana was an 18-year-old member of the Chagga tribe, a Tanzanian ethnic group that still calls the base of Kilimanjaro home.
Meyer assumed he was getting the best of the best, but in fact Lauwo and the teenagers chosen to act as porters were picked as a form of punishment from the tribal elders, who were upset that they’d been poaching. At the time, the tribe believed Kilimanjaro was an impossible journey; the Chagga chief thought sending the troublemakers up the mountain with Meyer would be the last he’d ever see of them.
What the chief didn’t know is that Yohana may have already reached Kili’s peak; some people believe Yohana had summited as many as nine times before. Either way, Yohana successfully led Meyer to the summit, and went on to earn his living as a Kilimanjaro guide, taking others up less perilous routes than the one he forged on that first, uncharted trek.