In 1873, when the Scottish geologist and explorer Joseph Thomson attempted to climb Kilimanjaro in one day (he reached no higher than the tree-line at about 2,700m) only a handful of Europeans had seen the mountain. It is 100 years since the American Revolution, and here's a continent three times the size of the US about which we still knew almost nothing beyond its coastline. The mid-19th century was the age of Livingstone and Stanley, the former venturing deep into the heart of Africa in search of both knowledge and potential converts to Christianity, and the latter in search of the former. The explorers had started to arrive in the 1860s, spurred on by the accounts of these missionaries and in particular that of Johannes Rebmann, a young Swiss-German, whose 1848 journey to Kilimanjaro was published in Volume I of the Church Missionary Intelligencer, which rolled off the European presses in May 1849. His description of the mountain finally put Kilimanjaro into the history books, but is perhaps just as famous for its outrageous suggestion that there was snow on the equator:

At about ten o'clock (I had no watch with me), I observed something remarkably white on the top of a high mountain, and first supposed that it was a very white cloud, in which supposition my guide also confirmed me, but having gone a few paces more I could no more rest satisfied with that explanation; and while I was asking my guide a second time whether that 'white thing' was indeed a cloud and scarcely listening to his answer that yonder was a cloud but what that white was he did not know, but supposed it was coldness - the most delightful recognition took place in my mind, of an old well-known European guest called snow. All the strange stories we had so often heard about the gold and silver mountain Kilimandjaro in Jagga, supposed to be inaccessible on account of evil spirits, which had killed a great many of those who had attempted to ascend it, were now at once rendered intelligible to me, as of course the extreme cold, to which poor Natives are perfect strangers, would soon chill and kill the half-naked visitors. I endeavoured to explain to my people the nature of that white thing for which no name exists even in the language of Jagga itself...

In later accounts, Rebmann corrected this error: the local Jagga (Chagga) tribe were indeed familiar with snow and did have a name for it: Kibo. Popular opinion back in Europe, which was influenced largely by armchair academics such as WD Cooley, refused to believe that there could be snow on the African equator - even though they knew of the existence of snow on the equator in South America.

Dr Hans Meyer finally summited on October 5, 1889. He was a geology professor and the son of a wealthy editor from Leipzig. Though no doubt a skillful and determined climber, Meyer's success can largely be attributed to his recognition that the biggest obstacle to a successful assault was the lack of food available at the top. Meyer solved this by establishing camps at various points along the route. Thanks to these intermediary camps, Meyer was able to conduct a number of attempts on the summit without having to return to the foot of Kili to replenish supplies after each; instead, food was brought to the camps by the porters every few days.

Soon the two great colonizers in East Africa, Germany and Britain, were jockeying for position in the region. British missionaries were accused of putting the temporal interests of their country over the spiritual affairs of their flock, while for their part certain German nationals made no secret of the fact they wished to colonize Kilimanjaro. The situation went back and forth for several decades until the post-World War I accords and the League of Nations charter designated the area a British Mandate (except for a small area in the northwest, which was ceded to Belgium and later became Rwanda and Burundi).

British rule came to an end in 1961 after a relatively peaceful (compared with neighboring Kenya, for instance) transition to independence. After the Zanzibar Revolution overthrew the Arab regime in neighboring Zanzibar, which had become independent in 1963, the island merged with mainland Tanganyika to form the nation of Tanzania on April 26, 1964.

So what does any of this have to do with the price of fish? Well, in April 1964 I was 9 years old, and attending school in Cambridge, England. By the time I was 10, standing on the summit of Kilimanjaro had already been added to what has now become known as a bucket list. Ignoring the more disturbing question of why a 10-year old would already have a bucket list, how did Kilimanjaro come to be on it? I don't remember how or when it would have come up in the classroom, but I can't believe these events and dates are a coincidence. These changes to the British colonial landscape would have been far more important in my Cambridge, England classrooms than they were to our counterparts in Cambridge, Massachusetts and beyond. However, the clincher was almost certainly the devastating news that over that summer my third-grade teacher had been killed in a Land Rover accident while on safari in Kenya. There is no question that a life-long fascination with the East African wildlife she had gone to see, and the huge free-standing mountain that so often seemed to be the backdrop to the pictures I collected throughout my teenage years, was rooted right there.

Another 45 years would roll by before, in July 2009, my brother-in-law and I committed to tackle the mountain. So on Friday 24 September 2010, after 45 years of dreaming, two years of planning, and one year of training, my third-grade influences, Thomson, Kilimanjaro, porters, staging camps, the Chagga people, Kibo-the-snow and Kibo-the-summit all finally came together. "This is their story."