Skiing on Mt Kenya? Yes... once upon a time

The year is 1936. Mount Kenya’s peaks and slopes are covered in snow and ice and a motley group of men are preparing for the first skiing championship on Kenya’s highest mountain.

Among them is the only female contestant, Nancye Kennaway, a dashing young 26 year-old from Britain, recently married to Noel Kennaway in what was then Fort Hall (modern day Murang’a) in Kenya’s Central Province.

“My mother was a keen skier,” recounts Kennaway’s son Tony as we go through the photo album meticulously put together by his late mother. A sepia photograph shows her in full skiing attire smiling at the camera.

Of course a visit to the mountain today will bring out a different story, since the glaciers have all but disappeared today and the snow caps have receded to only the tips of the high peaks.

The idea of holding a skiing championship on Mt Kenya was mooted by Bill Delap and P.V. Anson, keen skiers themselves, and when the Kennaways agreed, the competition was ready to go. The event was reported in the Kenyan press in December 1935 with the headline “Skiing Championship in Kenya.”

The plan to hold the first African Ski Championship had much to do with Delap, who was a regular on Mount Kenya and pioneered skiing on Lewis Glacier in 1933.

The championship course had two disciplines — downhill and jumping — hoped to become an annual event.

The article in the newspaper read that “snow conditions should be excellent at the glacial levels after these very plentiful short rains and it’s hoped that the snow will extend to levels below the glaciers, thus making a good long course for the downhill race and for skiing generally.”

The group of men including the hardy porters and the sole woman contestant held the competition at Lewis Glacier, doing a slalom race which is essentially a zigzag because there was not enough space for a downhill competition, and judged themselves.

Needless to say, Kennaway emerged the winner in the female category.

Delap was the winner in the men’s category with Kennaway’s husband was runner-up.

But Kennaway wasn’t the only person making history on Mt Kenya.

The head porter, Mtu Mathura, and his team of porters, highly amused at the wazungu on skiis having fun sliding downhill, asked if they could have a go.

“So they were put on the skis and set down the slope upon which they crashed into each other,” Tony retells the stories heard from his parents. Nevertheless, the porters almost without a doubt became the first Africans to ski.

But the porters made news on another front too — and this time in the British parliament, since Kenya then was a British colony.