Kilimanjaro National Park

Humans and their ancestors have probably been living in the shadow of Kilimanjaro since the dawn of man. Although nothing of great antiquity has been found on the mountain itself, there is plenty of evidence of ancient human occupation at nearby sites throughout the Rift Valley.

Stone bowls and rings, made from local lava, have been found on the western slopes of Kilimanjaro. Also found in the area are obsidian flakes and tools, pottery fragments and a stone axe. Similar stone bowls from elsewhere have been dated more than 2,000 years old, and one can only guess that the stone bowl makers left the mountain before the arrival of more recent peoples. Most of the artifacts found on Kilimanjaro can be traced to the Wachagga people who immigrated into the area some 250 or more years ago. The Wachagga were agriculturists and they soon settled down to farming Kilimanjaro's slopes, using the abundant water from the forest, making dams and irrigation furrows, building "forts" and in many ways leaving their mark on the landscape.

While African people have known and used Kilimanjaro for hundreds of generations, the first recorded references to the mountain were made by foreigners. Oddly enough, even though Kilimanjaro is huge and close enough to the trading caravan routes to be a key landmark for outsiders, there seem to be very few historical records. The first published note was written by Ptolemy, an Alexandrian geographer and astronomer, some 18 centuries ago. He mentioned a "great snow mountain" lying inland from a place called Rhapta. Arab and Chinese traders traveled along the coast of East Africa for many centuries and must have known about Kilimanjaro. But there is only one reference to a great mountain west of Zanzibar, which was made by a Chinese observer six or seven centuries ago.

This situation changed with the arrival of European missionaries and explorers. Johann Rebmann, a Christian missionary, is credited with bringing Kilimanjaro to the attention of Europe when his account of a snow-capped mountain near the equator was published in 1849. That he was not immediately believed is another of the oddities in the history of Kilimanjaro. After several attempts by various people to explore, map or climb to the summit, Hans Meyer finally reached Kilimanjaro's highest peak in 1889.

Naming the Mountain
There is no consensus about how the mountain got its current name "Kilimanjaro" although it probably evolved during the explorations of the last century. The Wachagga people, traditional agriculturalists of the area, claim they had no name for the mountain itself, just the two peaks that they call Kipoo and Kimawenzi.

Most speculations assume the name comes from two root words: kilima and njaro. Kilima comes from the Kiswahili word for mountain, mlima. The addition of ki is puzzling because in Kiswahili this is a diminutive, and so kilima means small hill. It has been suggested that the use of the diminutive is a gesture of affection towards the huge mountain.

The njaro part of the name is much more confusing. It could come from a Kichagga word for caravan, referring to the possibility that caravans used the mountain as a landmark. There is speculation that a word used on the coast, njaro, was the name of a demon that caused cold. Presumably traders or porters used the name when they traveled inland or heard tales about a high cold mountain.

Another possibility is that the travelers asked the Maasai living on the plains what they called the mountain and the Maasai may have answered that it was the source of water, using the word ngare, which was corrupted to njare or njaro.