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.

The London Illustrated News covered the story with pictures of barefoot porters plodding through the snow covered only in blankets, obviously shivering by the glacier.

Questions were asked in the British parliament as to why the Africans were forced to walk barefoot on Mt Kenya’s freezing snow.

“It was not normal for the porters to be barefoot above the snowline,” says Tony. “What happened was that the team were caught in a sudden snowstorm. Mathura was an expert hiker on the mountain and there had not been a snowstorm on the mountain for years.”

Fortunately the porters including the wazungu suffered only mountain sickness and no frost bite.

Vanishing snow

The 1936 annual skiing competition on Mt Kenya was the only one that ever happened, partly due to the lack of participants and partly financial constraints.

But even if it had taken off, climate change would have put an end to the annual competition by now.

The snow and ice on the volcanic peaks of Mt Kenya and Mt Kilimanjaro (the world’s tallest free standing mountain and Africa’s tallest at 19,340 feet) are melting away so fast that scientists estimate that in the next two to three decades they will have completely disappeared.

Twenty years ago, there were 18 glaciers on Mt Kenya. Today seven of them have completely disappeared.

Lewis Glacier, where the 1936 skiing championship took place, as Tyndall, Gregory and Cesar, have shrunk some 60-92 per cent.

According to research funded by the British Department for International Development, global warming has also caused a seven fold increase in malaria around the Mt Kenya area due to a two degree centigrade increase in average temperatures around the mountain in the past 20 years.

Average temperatures reached 17 degrees centigrade in 1989 and today it are 19 degrees centigrade.

The local population of four million people has little or no immunity to malaria.

The meltdown on the massifs of both Mt Kenya and Mt Kilimanjaro is of huge concern as both are also vital water towers in the semi-arid areas they straddle.

As the temperatures around the world rise from the effects of climate change, mostly blamed on the increase in carbon in the atmosphere (a major problem in the developed world) and the depleting of natural forest covers (a developing nations’ dilemma), the ice-fields cannot be replenished as fast as they melt.

It’s estimated that developed countries need to cut gas emissions by a minimum of 40 per cent from the 1990 levels and 80 per cent below 1990 levels by 2050.

Perhaps then, a repeat performance of the 1936 skiing championships can take place on Mount Kenya and malaria on “God’s mountain” will become history.