| Summary: | Mount Kilimanjaro is perhaps the most recognized geographic feature in sub-Saharan Africa. Rising to a height of 5,895 meters (19,340 feet), it is the tallest peak in Africa, the world’s tallest freestanding mountain, and the highest volcano outside of South America. The massif extends 95 kilometers from east to west and 65 kilometers north to south and is at least 30 kilometers away from the nearest peaks. Owing to its tremendous size, it gives rise to five distinct climate zones—temperate forest, rainforest, moorland, alpine desert, and ice cap—that emerge from the surrounding arid Maasai steppe. Its numerous rivers, arising in rainforest, provide surface water resources to the lower slopes as well as the surrounding watershed, which extends more than 300 kilometers to the Indian Ocean. Kilimanjaro is perhaps best known for its white cap, consisting of both glaciers and seasonal snowfall, that makes it unique among mountains in Africa. As an island in the middle of the steppe, Kilimanjaro has long been important in the lives of African communities. It has been most important to the Chagga-speaking peoples who have made it their permanent home. For more than five hundred years, they have developed agricultural societies on the southern and eastern slopes of the mountain, featuring intensive agriculture of bananas, yams, and other crops as well as an extensive system of surface irrigation. The mountain has also long been a spectacle for outsiders. In the mid-19th century, Europeans became enamored with the snow-capped mountain in Africa. A flood of explorers, missionaries, and mountaineers gave way to European conquest and colonization that lasted from the 1880s to the 1960s. Colonialism not only transformed life for Chagga peoples but also made Kilimanjaro into a symbol with broad-reaching importance across the continent and beyond. For more than a century, the Kilimanjaro area has been the focal point of contestation, debate, and struggle that, in many ways, makes it a microcosm of the colonial and ...
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