13/07/2026
The Rwenzori Mountains - Uganda🇺🇬
The Rwenzori is not a mountain but rather a mountain range, I thought I knew this, but not quite detailed.
Inside it sit six separate mountains - Stanley, Speke, Baker, Emin, Gessi, and Luigi di Savoia and across those six mountains, approximately 25 named peaks.
Six of Africa’s top ten highest peaks are all here. Not on Kilimanjaro or Mount Kenya. Margherita Peak on Mount Stanley stands at 5,109 metres - Africa’s third highest summit.
The glaciers on this mountain are nearly gone.
In 1906 the range held 6.5 square kilometres of glacier ice. Today less than 0.2 remains. Mount Baker’s glacier confirmed gone in 2022. Mount Speke’s glacier gone.
There is a lake right now at the Peak of the Mountain, I don’t think it even has a name yet.
The Bakonzo people have lived on the slopes of this mountain for centuries. Their supreme god - Kithasamba(you don’t say this name while on the Mountain) is believed to reside in the glaciated peaks. The glacier itself, the ice and snow, is sacred.
When the glacier disappears, and it will - they are not just losing a climate feature, it is something that has shaped their entire existence.
The mountain sits on the border of Uganda and DRC. It is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
It was first mapped by the ancient Greek geographer Ptolemy in 150 CE, who called it Lunae Montes - Mountains of the Moon and placed it as the source of the Nile.
He was 1,700 years ahead of the European explorers who would later arrive and name everything after Italian royals and British colonisers - writing over Bakonzo names that had existed for centuries.
Now here is where it gets interesting, Kilimanjaro receives 50,000+ visitors a year, Mount Kenya receives 30,000+ and the Rwenzoris - 7,700+ which most of them foreign. To climb this mountain as an Ugandan, it costs approximately four months of an average salary.
I went back for official work, but also with a personal motive, to document what we are losing, and to understand the politics behind the mountain and why less Ugandans climb it, and to ask the questions that nobody is asking loudly enough.
We are packaging the findings into a full story.
