Lawrence Winkler | Uhuru

‘Kilimanjaro is a snow-covered mountain 19,710 feet high, and is said
to be the highest mountain in Africa. Its western summit is called the
Masai ‘Ngaje Ngai’, the House of God. Close to the western summit
there is a dried and frozen carcass of a leopard. No one has explained
what the leopard was seeking at that altitude.’
Ernest Hemingway, Snows of Kilimanjaro

East of Dar es Salaam, my second lift came in the form of a long broad flat trailer bed of an eighteen-wheeler. I shared my expansive moving view of the savannah with two ageless, and near toothless, Africans in overalls, and homemade head wrappings to protect themselves from the sun and wind.

“Wheh ah you going?” The older one asked.

“Moshi,” I replied.

They both broke out in hysterical laughter. I asked them what they thought was so funny.

“Oh, my friend. You see, Moshi, eet ees very very fah.” He took a burnt piece of wood and drew a rough outline of Tanzania.

“We ah heah,” he said. “And you ah wanting to go ovah theh.”

They both broke out in hysterical laughter. Again. It was now the younger one’s turn to instruct the silly mzungu.

“Wheh ah you from?” He asked, expecting to be rewarded with the same opportunity for mirth, at my expense. I took the burnt stick, got up on the flying flatbed, walked almost to the other end of it, and made a cross on the wooden decking.

“Heah,” I said, terminating their enthusiasm for further instruction.

They roared off, waving goodbye, forty kilometers later. It wasn’t a long wait before Tom and his wife, two Aid volunteers, carried me along all the way to the Moshi turnoff. The two Spaniards waiting there gave me the evil eye for invading their hitching post. A few minutes later Jumo came by in his white Toyota Land Cruiser.

“Moshi!” the Spaniards yelled.

“I am driving only five kilometers,” he said. “You want to go?” He was lying.

“OK,” I said and jumped in. The Spaniards waved us off.

“Where are you really going?” I asked.

“Moshi,” he said, handing me a thick stick of sugar cane.

Our first stop, about halfway there, was at a roadside café, for chai and cake. We had almost finished, when two fluid shadows blocked our daylight, and then sat at the table across from us. I had seen black and white photos of primitive giants from another age, in the work of Thesiger, and other early explorers of the last remote places on the planet. I never imagined what it would be like to see them in the flesh, in color, with beads and red cloth, long heavy plaits of hair, bracelets, spears and shields. Fierce Masai warriors, in full regalia, shoehorned themselves into the booth opposite. They ordered tea and scones.

Beyond the sisal in the foreground, a white island in the sky began to materialize ahead. It was my first view of Kilimanjaro.  I wanted to stand on its summit, for my 28^th birthday. Jumo dropped me at the YMCA in Moshi. There were two tasks to accomplish here. I needed to find a way to legally climb the mountain, and I needed to find a way to pay for it. I had saved a thousand dollars a month for the six months that I had worked as a doctor in South Africa, and I had been frugal while there. Even in 1981, it was not a lot of money, and I still had most of the world in front of me.

The first requirement was suggested by the notice board at the YMCA. A local tour operator was holding a meeting next morning, for all those interested in making the climb. Outside the hostel, an Indian taxi driver told me he would solve my second problem, if I would meet him an hour later and bring my passport.

I waited around for an hour, with some French and two Japanese girls, for the arrival of the tour operator next morning. One of the girls had retrieved a brochure, with the cost of the trip reluctantly disclosed in fine print on the back. That did me. I went on to Akhee, waiting in his taxi outside. I asked him to explain.

“You will see,” he said, nodding his turban back and forth, as if that was some kind of partial explanation. He drove. We eventually arrived at a shop in the centre of Moshi. We went upstairs and met his family. They told me they wanted to leave Tanzania, but they were being held hostage by Saint Julius, and his requirement for foreign exchange certificates, to be able to purchase US dollars. If you had these certificates and a foreign passport, you could buy hard currency. If you only had a Tanzanian passport, like the Sikhs of Moshi, you were part of the extended ‘familyhood’ of the Ujamaa, and you were going to be buried in Tanzania. They asked me to help. I asked what they had in mind. They told me that they would provide me with a ‘doctored’ (great choice of word) foreign exchange certificate, and a sum of Tanzanian shillings to exchange in one of the local Moshi banks, for dollars. They would trade the dollars on the black market for ten times the shillings we started with, and then they would give me a new foreign exchange certificate and the shillings, to exchange at another Moshi bank, for ten times the dollars we started with. And so on. I asked how I would benefit from such activity, and what kind of risk I would assume. They offered me fifteen per cent for my assistance and reassured me that I had no liability. They were truthful about the first part. They lied through their teeth about the second.

For most of the rest of the day, I visited all the banks in Moshi, and some in the surrounding towns. At the end of the day, I was looking over a Kilimanjaro of bills that Al Capone would have considered a fine day’s work. I had made a pile of cash, and Akhee’s family would be leaving Tanzania in style.

What I did learn, at the foot of Kilimanjaro, was that there was a mandatory ten-year prison sentence for anyone caught falsifying foreign exchange certificates and using the black market for profit. I was one lucky mzungu. Until my apprehension, however, I was off to climb the highest mountain in Africa.

***

Akhee drove me to the Kilimanjaro turnoff next morning in his taxi. He said it was a tip. Three local guys in a big old bus picked me up, but we broke down just a few kilometers later. My final ride came from a lady from Moshi, traveling with her three dogs. She dropped me at the Kibo Hotel. She said it was the ‘nuhv centah.’ I hadn’t expected such opulence but, on reflection, this was one of the peaks that any serious climber needed to summit and was still accessible to mere mortals like me. This was in an era before collective picnics of physical exertion supplanted basic clinical research, as a means of curing medical and other afflictions, before the perverse viral notion that climbing a mountain could make you a ‘survivor’ (at least until your cancer metastasized). Before every ribbon color was spoken for, I wanted to climb Kilimanjaro for the same reason Hillary had climbed the cloud-piercer. ‘Because it was there.’ And because I was here, like Sir Edmund, I was going to ‘knock the bastard off.’

My best plans to do that were decimated a few minutes later. I had spoken with the tour manager and Park official in their offices. I still couldn’t afford the adventure.

I sat on the front steps of the Kibo Hotel, looking out on the elusive snow-capped object of my desire. I cracked open my Hemingway. It was the story of a writer waiting to die of gangrene from a thorn, lying on his death cot on the plains below Kilimanjaro.

“Great writer, he was,” came a voice, up and behind me to the left. “But it was a different time.” A well-dressed older black man smiled and sat down beside me.

“Magnificent, isn’t she?” He said, stretching out his long legs.

“How do you know she’s a she?” I asked.

“All things of great beauty in life are feminine,” he answered. Not just a pretty face, I thought. Here was an obvious well-educated gentleman of refinement. I felt like the hobo I was.

“Are you going to climb her?” He asked. I told him I had wanted to, but that all the costs involved made the idea prohibitive. He asked what I could afford to spend.

“They’d have to take a zero off,” I said. “The very rich are different from you and me.”

“Yes, they have more money.” He wished me luck and went back inside the hotel.

About twenty minutes later, a uniformed doorman was standing above me. I thought he was going to tell me to be on my way.

“Mr. Godfrey would like to see you,” he said.

“Who’s Mr. Godfrey?” I asked, now more concerned.

“Mr. Godfrey is the manajah,” he said. Worse than I initially thought even.

He took me through the lobby, to an office with the view. The man from the steps was sitting behind the desk. A young fit-looking black teenager wearing a baseball cap was sitting beside the desk.

“This is Harold. He is not registered, and you will tell no one. Do you understand this?” He said. I told him I didn’t understand this.

“I have taken off your zero. Harold will be your guide. You leave tomorrow morning for Uhuru.” I was speechless. I asked him why he was doing this.

“Because it’s there and you’re here,” he said. “And because I am a great admirer of Hemingway.”

I told him I didn’t know how to thank him. He told me to thank Harold instead, generously, at the end of the trek.

“Harold will collect you at eight tomorrow morning. He will take you shopping to buy the food for your expedition. I have arranged things so you can have a good rest.” Mr. Godfrey sent me to the front desk, where they had also taken a zero off. The desk clerk told me that there was one missing in the dining room as well. There was soup, fish with salad, pork potatoes and cabbage, and ice cream. Mr. Godfrey brought me a glass of wine, and a smile. I gave him back the smile.

True to his word, Harold was waiting for me in the lobby next morning at eight o’clock. He told me to give him six shillings, which I duly provided. By the time I had finished toast and coffee he had returned with a bag of sugar.

“Now we must buy food on the way up the mountain,” he said. Harold picked out exactly what he wanted, in the shops along the inclining road: biscuits, corned beef, coffee, tea, ‘special’ dried beans, rice, cooking oil, and twenty shillings worth of fresh meat. Harold was fussy, waiting until they had almost dissected out the entire freshly dispatched cow, before selecting the cuts he wanted.

“One moh stop,” he said, pulling me by my sleeve onto a path into a clearing. The several guys who greeted Harold and I, were busy squeezing the juice from peeling bananas into jerry cans and adding ground roasted sorghum. Harold was more interested in the contents of the containers from the previous day.

“Thees ees owa tradishun,” Harold said, draining off a jar of banana beer, and offering me the next pour. I asked him what the possible survival advantage of total inebriation could be before beginning the ascent of the highest mountain on the continent.

“Theh ees no advantage,” he explained. I drank the jar.

Harry Street: “The marvelous thing is that it’s painless now.’’
Helen: “Is it really?”
Harry Street: “Yes. That’s how you know when it starts.”

We wiped our mouths, and I gave the brew master five shillings. The real trek began beyond the park gate, past a Chagga village and a coffee plantation, a few hundred meters up the road. It was here we met eleven other mzungus congregated to begin the climb through four seasons in as many days. There were, as usual, Australians, Jack, an elder statesman and a nice couple from Perth, Colin and Libby; Peter and Pribem, two young Danes that ended up playing chess with my miniature set during most of the downtime; and six different very rich on a package tour- two English girls, Sue and Sally; Americans, Tom and Betty Ann, and Canadians, Pat and the female half of which, Rita, had my last name but was no relation. They had porters, one for their camera gear alone. Another carried two large Luis Vuitton suitcases, a handle clenched in each fist. It was also here that my entry fee was accompanied by the quiet terror of a currency declaration form, and an explanation of the penalties for falsification.

Tom the American began jumping up and down, and Betty Sue, his girlfriend, screamed for someone to pull off his boot.
“Nyoki-nyoki,” said Harold.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“Maybe hornet,” he said. He didn’t take the boot off, because he said he still knew where the hornet was with the boot on, and the mzungu would eventually stomp it to death anyway. I hoped it wasn’t a thorn.

***

Formalities complete, Harold and I set off through cultivated plantations, across numerous streams, arriving late afternoon to the comfort of Mandara Hut. We enjoyed the peace for a little while, before the loud chatter of the other climbers caught us up. It was a boisterous first night, with everyone clomping around in their boots, asserting their individual ascendancy. Harold and I ate simply, but the others feasted sumptuously on the exotic victuals their porters had carried for them. Unlike them, I had taken the pack, and Harold carried only his bedroll and the grand vision of the quest. I didn’t sleep well because of the noise. Whenever I started to nod off into twilight, the air was pierced with thorns.

Breakfast was a simple affair of two crackers, coffee, and an orange that rolled down the table from Libby. The others ate more strategically for the day’s vertical kilometer distance, stretching, and lobbing ‘aerobic index’ and other competitive phrases around the room, as their porters packed.

We hiked up into the tall trees and mud track of the vast montane forest, along steep ridges rising, and deep gorges falling, on either side. Muscular Tarzan vines hung loose and flexed for the weight of Jane. The yellow and red trumpets of Impatiens kilimanjari stood out from the rest of the orchestra, poised to provide the fanfare for her procession. Dappled light danced across the various textures of bark. I spied a Colobus monkey in the canopy. The mists rolled across villages of African violets, and we became clouds.

Magnificent views of Kibo and Mawenzi peaks greeted our emergence from the forest. Brush gave way to giant heathers and moorland, wild grassland, and a rocky trail. The clouds floating at eye level began dropping below and behind us. It eventually formed a mattress of cotton, above which we floated ever upwards. We traversed large fields of yellow proteas, red-hot pokers, and an ocean of other splendid wildflowers. Bowlfuls of potable water sat in giant tree cabbage Senecio. The ceiling became a more vivid blue, as the airborne dust of the plains was left further behind, and the thinning atmosphere whipped up a relentless wind to protest its escaping gases. A sentinel moon stalked us, larger than it should have been. We staggered along an uneven rock trail, through the high alpine grey, straw and lichen green tussock, Mawenzi on our right, and the snows of Kibo dead ahead. My ears and neck were burned red by the time Harold and I reached Horombo hut, the first again by over two hours. The different very rich feasted aloof and from afar again, while Harold and I ate fresh local. I had trouble sleeping because of the cold. My midnight stumble out to urinate, lingered for the splendid display of stars above, and the distant lights of Moshi below. Kibo’s opalescent icing loomed over the hill. It was a surreal and peaceful sky island I closed my eyes on.

Friction between the Aussies and the different very rich rubbed me awake next morning. Ostensibly a dispute over counter space, it was a proxy war over the distribution of world resources. The game was rigged, and the Aussies lost. Harold and I sat in an unobtrusive corner, drinking our coffee and eating our biscuits. We were the first to leave.

The highland desert we entered was an expanse of volcanic rock, punctuated for a short while by yellow daisy-like astoraceae. And then, everything went dead. Gravel, dust and wind, and long shadows, with whatever destiny there was, loomed ever larger in the distance. Just after we got to Kibo hut, the lights went out on Mawenzi from the bottom up. The Aussies arrived, followed by the Danes, and then the different very rich and their Louis Vuitton contingent. They were still dressing for dinner, long after Harold and I had finished our corned beef and biscuits and were trying to sleep.

Which, of course, was impossible at 15,500 feet, in an inadequate sleeping bag (unfortunately, the Gold Kazoo was not up to the task), afflicted with sore eyes, grumbly guts, lightheadedness, palpitations, the rowdy rich, and a booming high-altitude headache. I was still awake when Harold woke me at one in the morning, to begin the final push for the summit. I poured one of Libby’s aspirins into my coffee, donned my two shirts, sweater, my only two pairs of socks, anorak, and rented toque, gloves and Godfrey’s Kibo Hotel hiking boots, and picked up my walking stick and grit. I was wearing everything I owned, and more. Harold had patched us into the first group trying for the summit, a pod of over-equipped Germans, who insisted on resting at every zigzag. It was horrible and fantastic at the same time- horrible because of my freezing toes turning into frostbite, the monotonous view of the feet of the climber in front of me, slipping on the partially frozen scree which made it necessary, and possible, for us to climb in the dark, but slipping anyway, and the labor of my breathing: lead with right foot and inhale; follow with left foot and walking stick, and exhale—fantastic because of the now top-down lit views of Mawenzi, with the sun rising over the clouds as the stars receded. Somewhere I lost a glove, when the Germans stopped at Hans Meyer Cave three hours later to change their entire climbing ‘wardrobe.’  Harold seemed concerned, but I no longer cared. We joined two Poles and their guide and picked up our pace. Massive glaciers drew up alongside us as we cranked it to Gilman’s Point. We all shook hands, signed the book, and tried to catch our breath, still far behind us. Then I said…

“Harold… Uhuru. Twende.” Let’s go. And we went. Faster than we should have, slower than we wanted. One step for every four heartbeats, up the steep stairway to the House of God. And then, finally, there was no place to go. The cloud cushion, so far below, merged with our snowfields. We stood on top of Africa, Mount Nel in the background, the curvature of the Earth vertigo inducing, the reaches of outer space within arm’s reach. Uhuru means ‘freedom’ in Swahili. It was my 28^th birthday, and Harold and Godfrey had just given me my present. I was exhausted, hungry, hypothermic, and close to frostbite and collapse. Before Harry Street died of his gangrene, Papa Hemingway had written him. musing.

“I wonder if there’ll be another time as good as this.”

He had also supplied the answer.

‘And there was never another time like that first time in Africa.’

***

‘Kilimanjaro is a pretty tricky climb you know, most of it’s up until you
reach the very very top, and then it tends to slope away rather
sharply.’ –Monty Python

I hadn’t found Papa Hemingway’s leopard near the Western Summit, nor what he had been seeking there either. Most of the snows I climbed on my 28^th birthday have long since melted off Kilimanjaro’s slopes, because of climate change.

None of the French team, or the Japanese girls I had met in Moshi, made the summit. Neither did the different very rich, with their Louis Vuitton luggage. For them, it was never about the destination anyway. Nor the journey. It was just a brochure. Money can buy you out of almost any meaningful commitment.

Harold was keen to start our descent, so I let him go. He started to ski down the snow, and then still frosted scree, of our broken path. We rested for an hour at Kibo Hut, and then Harold began to drag me along without mercy. From the Arctic to Altiplano to wildflower highland to grassland to the exotic fronded plants outside the second Hut. After a plate of plain rice, I died in Horombo, like Harry Street had died in delirium. A steaming cup of tea, provided by a steaming Harold, woke me at dawn. After ninety minutes of stone stumbling down the rocky trail at full speed, we re-entered the cloud forest. Two hours later, I was receiving my Uhuru diploma at the Marengo gate. Harold quick marched me to the Kibo Hotel, where I bought him a beer, and then paid him the fee we agreed upon. Twice.

Before I left the hotel, I needed to locate Mr. Godfrey to thank him, but I needn’t have worried. He knew where to find me, long before I had even re-entered the outer regions of his domain.

“So, you knocked the bastard off,” he began.

“I did, Sir. But only with your generosity and assistance,” I replied.

“Did you discover anything that Hemingway missed?” He asked.

“Perhaps,” I said.

“And is there any use that you think you will have for it?” He asked. I remembered what Harry Street had remarked when asked about his African trip.

“There’s a wonderful book in it. Maybe I’ll write it someday.’’

===

Images: Claude/ChatGPT remixed