Kisoi Munyao: The Forgotten Kenyan Who Conquered Mount Kenya in 1959

SPECIAL FEATURE 23

DAILY NATION Wednesday December 12 ,2007

A GREAT KENYAN REMEMBERED

Through 'The Gate of the Mists' with Kisoi Munyao on Mount Kenya

By PETER FULLERTON

Peter fullerton was the District officer in Meru in 1958

Image of Kisoi Munyao with Peter Fullerton on the summit of Batian on Mount Kenya

A Flagless Victory on the Summit of Mount Kenya

When Kisoi Munyao first ascended Mount Kenya I was fortunate to be on the climb with him. We had not brought a flag with us but found a piece of bamboo and an old T-shirt on the top. These we raised in a victorious gestured And of course there was a lot of back slapping and shouts of "Tumeshinda"

Image of Kisoi Munyao with John Howard a former DC of Machakos

Neither Kisoi nor I had previously done much serious rock climbing .The credit for getting us both to the summit goes to John Howard , a former DC Machakos who planned and led the expedition .John was an experienced mountaineer and had already climbed Mount Kenya several times. His climbing partner had usually been Arthur firmin the Nairobi Photographer who took so many fine photographs of Mount Kenya.

The Legacy of Arthur Firmin- Mount Kenya Photographer

Howard and Firmnin had also been on two climbs together in the Himalayas on the last of which Firmin had fallen and broken a leg while climbing a boulder "just for exercise" on their way home. He died of pneumonia before they could get him to hospital. Kisoi Munyao had been Firmin's cook and Firmin had taught him to climb .John Howard suggested that Kisoi should join this climbing party which was organized in February 1959 in Firmin's Memory

The group included three other friends of John Howard all members of the famous International Alpine Club .One of them Sir Geoffrey Furlong had recently retired as HM Ambassador in Addis Ababa and at the age of sixty firmly announced that he wanted to be the oldest man ever to climb the mountain. The expedition was also part of a team of members of the Mountain Club who were helping to build the new Top Hut . A few months earlier I had been with a party who cajoled with much pushing and pulling a troop of Raymond Hook's Mules up the Naromoru track loaded with cement and timber .Howard organized a party of porters from Meru to follow on with the aluminum mabati and wooden flooring for the Hut .

The Journey Begins – Chogoria Route

He decided that the Chogoria route was better for this purpose , as well as providing a more scenic approach to the mountain for the climbers. The whole party set off from Chogoria and plodded up through the forest carrying our various loads .It was slow going especially in the bamboo zone where the track was overgrown.

The porters had a tough job in wending their way through the bamboo thickets with head loads of mabati getting caught in the clumps on either side of the track. We eventually emerged from the forest late in the evening into a clearing where we pitched camp . The next day's match was comparatively easy going along a ridge passing ithaguni a peak of over 12,000 feet on our left .We camped besides a lake with a fine view of the peaks of the mountain with the sun setting in glory behind them .

Crossing the Saddle

Everyone was in better spirits and we sang a variety of old army songs including "Funga Safari" around the campfire. The next day was a short but steep traverse along the shoulder of the mountain and up and over the saddle between Lenanan and the main peaks .The porters stacked the loads on the site of the new hut near the curling pond and we heard later that they had got back to Chogoria that night

The climbing party all squeezed into the top hut and prepared for an early start the next morning .John Howard decided that there would be two climbing parties ,the first led by himself with Kisoi and me and the second with Alpinist on the following day it was a fine ,clear and cold night with a prospect of a cloudless day and so it turned out to be .

Across the Lewis Glacier

We left the hut at 5 am and groped our way across the Lewis glacier to the foot of the rock wall where the conventional route began. Kisoi and I were a bit awed by the exposure at some points on the ridge climb which john Howard dismissed as "a bit draughty" and patiently led us up. At one point we passed a mysterious corpse clothed only in a blanket and lying in a pocket of snow. The body was shriveled beyond recognition but preserved by the cold .There is no legend about it and no indication whether the man died on the way up or on the way down the mountain .We pressed on .

The well named Rickety crack was the turning point of the climb a good hand hold at the top of the steep pitch and then we were onto an easy scramble to the top of Nelion .It was now 9 am a perfect day with no wind and sunshine glistening on the snow. John was unsure about the next stage traversing the top of the diamond glacier between Nelion and Batian .We knew that neither Kisoi nor I had ever climbed on ice let alone on an ice wall sloping at 45 degrees on either side of a knife edge cornice.

The Gate of the Mists

The shape of the cornice was known to vary from season to season and cutting steps in it to make the 50 yard crossing to Batian known as 'the gate of the mists' called for alpine levels of skills and judgement .John decided to cross on the western side of the glacier and a line of steps about three feet below the cornice There was no way in which one could belay with an ice axe in the snow crust and hold a body if anyone fell the drill John explained was that if anyone slipped the next man on the rope had to jump off on the other side of the cornice to counterbalance the one who had slipped and then work their way back to the starting point.

Standing on Batian – 17,000 Feet Above Kenya

Kisoi followed John in the steps that he cut and we were over the glacier in about a quarter of an hour .We were both mighty relieved to be on hard rock again .The rest was a doodle a short scramble up to the peak of Batian and we were there.

There was not a cloud in the sky .hardly a breeze and at 17,000 feet the sun was hot enough to sit in shirt sleeves .We sat and swigged out water bottles and munched our sandwiches wuth the whole of kenya at our feet. Kisoi could see machakos his own district ,all its hills and valleys ironed out by the distance .We thought that we could just make out the peak of Kilimanjaro through the haze ,200 miles due south ,but the rest of the horizon wa a grey circular plateau.

 A Night Story from the Summit

John described to us how he had once spend the night on the top of Batian when he was climbing with Arthur Firmin .Climbing a new route ,they had taken longer to reach the peak than they had expected and the cloud welled up from below and covered the mountain before they could begin the descent . It was too risky to go down through the thick mist and they had no option but to stay put. They had no bivouac or sleeping bag s with them so they spent the night alternatively stamping their feet and huddled under a boulder in sub zero temperatures .

During the night the sky cleared and they could see the glow of lights over Nairobi. They started down at first light and reached Top Hut just before sunrise. Fortunately they were climbing alone so no one had raised the alarm. The following day the other three climbers in the party set off. None had done Mt Kenya before but they were all experienced climbers and were going by John's direction.

The Other Climbers and a Brandy Celebration

They took longer than expected onto the last ridge on the way down. There they seemed to be stuck and john and I went across the glacier and up a few hundred feet in the dusk to see if they needed help. One of the party had got tangled upside down in an abseil. By the time we reached them they had righted him. They were all pretty well exhausted from the climb though the 60 -year old Ambassador seemed the least knackered of the three. We celebrated that night in the hut with a bottle of brandy which someone had thoughtfully brought.There was a good deal of ribbing of the climber who had managed to get into a helpless state of knitting with himself upside down on the rope.

The Descent to Chogoria

Next Day we packed up early and trekked down to Chogoria along plod but with much lighter loads , and we found it much easier to talk than breathing hard on the way up. We went our various ways. John went back to ALDEV where he was running settlement schemes ;the alpinist went back to England ;and Kisoi Munyao went home to Machakos. We never met again ,but the next time I heard about him was on Independence Day in 1963 .

Independence Day – A National Hero

By that time I had left Kenya and Joined the Foreign and commonwealth Office. I came back to Nairobi for Independence as Private Secretary to the Duke of Devonshiire ,the Minister of state who attended the Independence celebrations. I heard on the loudspeaker in the arena that Kisoi had been on the summit of Mt Kenya the Night before and was being flown in to meet President Kenyatta I did not have a chance to see him but I remember the the roar of congratulation from the crowd.

It was only after Kisoi's funeral this year that I learned from Robert Chambers about the epic climb which he had done with Kisoi for Independence Day . To climb Mt Kenya in December was a feat of hardship and endurance ;and the success was a credit to the whole team which supported the expedition. When I was reminded of that day nearly 50 years ago when we climbed the mountain as companions and stood on the top together . He was a good man and deserved to be remembered at a state occasion