Worshippers at a shrine in Muranga pray facing Mount Kenya during a ceremony to ask for rain. They also sacrificed a goat. The 17,057-foot mountain has lost 92 percent of its glacier cover during the past 100 years.
MURANGA, Kenya — From a tree-shaded plateau facing Mount Kenya, the worshippers gaze anxiously at its melting icecap and wonder: Is God dead?
For 7 million Kenyans who rely on the runoff of Africa’s second-highest peak to survive, evaporating springs and dry riverbeds are making life harder. In the Kenyan capital, Nairobi, reduced melts have contributed to rolling blackouts when rivers fed by the mountain are unable to run hydroelectric plants.
But for those Kenyans who still practice tribal religions and revere Mount Kenya as the home of God, the environmental alterations mean more than a threat to their livelihood. For them, the melting ice and other changes on their mountain have triggered a crisis of faith.
“This is where our God lives, and it is being destroyed,” said Mwangi Njorge, 95, one of those mostly older Kenyans who continue to make sacrifices to the deity they believe resides on Mount Kenya. He worries that the disappearing ice is a sign of God’s fury. “God is very angry, and if things don’t change, I fear he might abandon us forever.”
The scientific community is divided over the causes of melting ice caps in Africa. But many experts believe the retreating snow on Mount Kenya is one of the continent’s clearest examples of climate change and global warming.
The 17,057-foot mountain, located along the equator, has lost 92 percent of its glacial cover over the past 100 years, and experts predict the ice will disappear by 2050. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned in a 2007 report that countries such as Kenya will bear a huge burden of the fallout from rising temperatures and specifically pointed to the vulnerability of mountain environments such as Mount Kenya’s.
The stories of Mount Kenya’s worshippers put a human face on a brewing standoff between developed countries, which are blamed for contributing to most of the world’s climate change through carbon emissions and other pollution, and developing regions, such as Africa, which is seeking $67 billion a year in compensation for the economic and social costs.
Worshippers of the Mount Kenya deity already have incorporated the melting ice into their oral traditions, said Jeffrey Fadiman, a California State University, San Jose, professor who spent months on the majestic landmark collecting the oral histories of local tribes.
“Elders see the glacier melting as a punishment for younger people abandoning and violating their traditions,” Fadiman said.
It’s no surprise that Kenya’s earliest settlers revered the mountain. Shrouded in mist and covered year-round with a blinding carpet of snow, Mount Kenya inspired awe and legend from every tribe that laid eyes on it. Locals called it Kirinyaga, or “mountain of brightness.”
Scholars date the oral traditions surrounding Mount Kenya back as far as 500 years, when tribes such as the Kikuyu and Meru arrived in the region. Life and worship centered on the mountain. They prayed facing Mount Kenya and oriented their homes toward the peak. Sacrificial animals were positioned to face the mountain before slaughter.
Over the years, the extinct volcano has remained at the center of the country’s history. Mau Mau rebels hid in its forests during the fight for independence from British colonialists. Jomo Kenyatta, Kenya’s first president, titled his autobiography “Facing Mt. Kenya.”
“It was so white, so beautiful, you could see it from everywhere,” Njorge said.
Global warming is widely believed to be contributing to Mount Kenya’s melting ice. But part of the mountain’s environmental transformation is brought on by local activities, experts say.
Lush green forests have been chopped down. Development — of marijuana farms, of pastures for cattle, and for tourism — has taken a toll.
Environmental activist Fredrick Njau said logging, paper production, charcoal-making and other commercial exploitation ran amok during the presidency of Daniel Arap Moi, when government leaders gave their friends and allies a free hand in profiting from Kenya’s forests.
“The government really shot itself in the foot,” said Njau, project coordinator for the Nairobi-based Green Belt Movement.
Although how much of Mount Kenya’s forest cover was lost is unclear, a 1999 Kenya Wildlife Service survey observed nearly 20,000 acres of freshly logged terrain. Today around the base of Mount Kenya, stumps are nearly as common as trees.
“This is a sin against God,” said John Irungu, a local farmer who helps maintain a shrine where the first Kikuyus were believed to have settled.
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