Rwenzori Mountains - Human History

Human History

In 150 AD the Alexandrian Greek geographer Ptolemy referred to a snowcapped massif in the heart of Africa by the name of Lunae Montes, or Mountains of the Moon. These are now widely accepted to be the Rwenzori Mountains.

The first modern European sighting of the Rwenzori was by the expedition of Henry Morton Stanley in 1889 (the clouds possibly being the reason two decades of previous explorers had not seen them). On June 7, the expedition's second-in-command and its military commander, William Grant Stairs, climbed to 3,254 metres (10,676 ft), the first known non-African ever to climb in the range. The first ascent to the summit was made by the Duke of the Abruzzi in 1906. His expedition quickly made first ascents of all major snow and ice peaks, mapping their complex geography, and leaving them with Italian names. His team consisted of mountain guides, biologists, surveyors, a geologist, photographers, and some one hundred and fifty porters. Photographer Vittorio Sella took a number of photographs showing a now-vanished world. Sella's photographic work is conserved at the Museo Nazionale della Montagna, in Torino, and at the Istituto di Fotografia Alpina Vittorio Sella, in Biella, both in Italy. The Makerere University, Uganda, also has a selection of his images.

The Rwenzori range is the home of the Konjo and Amba peoples. In the early 1900s, these two tribes were added to the Toro Kingdom by the colonial powers. The Konjo and Amba began to agitate for separation from Toro in the 1950s, a movement that became Rwenzururu, an armed secessionist movement, by the mid-1960s. The insurgency ended through a negotiated settlement in 1982, though the Rwenzururu Kingdom was acknowledged by the government in 2008.