Uganda’s highest peak should bear King Oyo’s name
Uganda’s highest peak still bears the name of an Italian queen who never set foot on the mountain. King Oyo did — reaching its summit and using the climb to draw attention to the disappearing Rwenzori glaciers. Now, Uganda has an opportunity to honour a young king who earned the summit by renaming it in his memory.
Ambrose Ruyooka. (Courtesy)
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OPINION
By Ambrose Ruyooka
At 5,109 metres, above the equatorial mist and the last of Africa’s equatorial glaciers, stands the highest point in Uganda. To cartographers and to the international climbing fraternity, it is Margherita Peak, on Mount Stanley, in the Rwenzori.
Uganda has just lost Omukama Oyo Nyimba Kabamba Iguru Rukidi IV of Tooro, who has gone to his ancestors at 34, after 31 years on the throne. In the silence that follows the passing of a young king, a question is worth asking plainly: Why does the roof of this country still carry the name of an Italian queen who never set foot on the mountain, when our own monarch walked its ice, stood on its summit, and used that height to warn the world that the glaciers beneath his boots were disappearing?
It is time to rename the highest point of the Rwenzori after King Oyo. The earlier name was never ours.
The idea that Europeans discovered the Rwenzori is a story Europe told itself. Long before Henry Morton Stanley caught his glimpse of the snows in 1888, the mountain already had names in the mouths of the people who lived beneath it. The Bakonzo called it Rwenzururu, the place of snow, and held its upper reaches as sacred ground. In Rutooro it was Rwenzura. In Runyankore and Rukiga, it was Rwenjura from enjura, the rain.
Our elders told it this way. Men walked north on foot, in groups, to work and barter for salt at Lake Katwe, okuhonera omwoonyo. They came from Kigezi, from Nkore, from the old Mpororo, and from as far as Karagwe in what is now north-western Tanzania. Their road ran through what we today call Queen Elizabeth National Park, past elephants and buffalo and lions, and they crossed the Kazinga Channel on a bridge of two felled trees while hippos and crocodiles watched from the water. They came home speaking of the mountain that made the rain. Rwenzori is a European ear’s rendering of what those men were already saying. Three languages, one meaning: snow, mist, rain.
Nor is this only family memory. Historians of the region trace the main land route out of Katwe as crossing Nkore and linking onward to Kigezi, Rwanda and Karagwe, and the Katwe and Kasenyi salt works as supplying that whole southern arc.
Further back still, around 150 AD, Claudius Ptolemy set down the Lunae Montes — the Mountains of the Moon — a range whose snows, he wrote, melted into the great lakes that fed the Nile. Ptolemy never came near the place. He was recording, at third hand, a name that the people who lived there were already using, carried to Alexandria along African trade routes not unlike the salt paths our grandfathers walked. The mountain was known. Its name was known. It was simply not known to Europe.
When Prince Luigi Amedeo, Duke of the Abruzzi, led the first recorded alpine ascent in 1906, he named the summit for Margherita of Savoy, Queen Consort of Italy. The climb was a genuine feat, and the duke’s survey of the glaciers is now our earliest climate baseline. The naming was something else. It attached a European court to an African summit that had no connection to it whatsoever.
A king who earned the summit
Margherita of Savoy never saw the mountain named for her. King Oyo did more than see it.
In July and August 2022, he left Karuzika Palace and walked in through the Nyakalengija gate like any other climber. Over roughly 10 days, he crossed the bogs, the giant heather, the rock and the crevassed ice, reaching the summit on the fifth day, then sat out a snowstorm at Margherita Camp before descending.
He became the first reigning monarch to stand on the highest point of the Mountains of the Moon.
It was not a vanity climb. The expedition was mounted with the United Nations Development Programme and the Uganda Tourism Board under a conservation campaign. The king’s purpose was blunt: the Rwenzori glaciers, which feed the rivers of Kasese, Bundibugyo and Kabarole and ultimately the Nile basin, were melting. Ice that covered more than 6sq.km when the Duke arrived in 1906 has shrunk to a fraction of that. He went up to say so from the only place where saying it could not be ignored, and while he was there, he asked for something practical and unglamorous: boardwalks, ladders, trained rescue teams, first aid for the people who climb and the porters who carry.
He earned that summit one step at a time, the way it must be earned.
Naming is never neutral
Toponymy is a statement about who a place belongs to and what a nation chooses to remember. Africa has made such statements before, and Uganda has made one recently.
At independence, Tanganyika renamed the summit of Kilimanjaro. Kaiser-Wilhelm-Spitze became Uhuru Peak, and Africa’s highest point now carries the word for freedom rather than the name of a German emperor. Closer to home, and on this very massif, Moebius Peak on Mount Stanley was renamed Cheptegei Peak in 2020 in honour of Joshua Cheptegei, through a process involving the Uganda Wildlife Authority and the Uganda Tourism Board. Uganda has already shown it can rename a Rwenzori summit for a Ugandan the nation is proud of. The precedent is six years old and it is on the same mountain.
There is also a Ugandan warning, and it should be faced squarely. On December 17, 1972, Idi Amin proclaimed a wave of renamings in almost these very words; the Voice of Uganda called it authenticity over colonialism. Lake Edward became Lake Amin Dada, Lake Albert became Lake Mobutu Sese Seko, Murchison became Kabalega, Queen Elizabeth became Rwenzori National Park. By 1979, every one of those names was gone.
Two things this proposal must get right
The summit is shared. The Uganda-DR Congo boundary runs across the top of Mount Stanley, and Margherita Peak is the highest point of both countries; the range is also a United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation world heritage site. Uganda cannot rename it by decree alone. But Uganda can determine the name used on its own maps, in its own gazetteer and by its own park authority, exactly as the DR Congo has long called the mountain Ngaliema rather than Stanley. The right sequence is a domestic designation, then a formal approach to Kinshasa and to UNESCO.
The mountain is Bakonzo before it is anyone’s. Its upper reaches are the abode of Kithasamba, and the Bakonzo have kept sacred sites there for as long as they have memory. An argument that rejects one imposed name only to impose another would deserve every objection it received. So let the process begin the other way round. Let the Obusinga Bwa Rwenzururu be the first institution consulted, not the last informed, and let the guides, porters and rangers who carry every expedition be in the room. The Rwenzori is not one community, and a process that turns the mountain into a trophy for any single institution will deserve to fail. If the outcome is a name pairing the King’s memory with the mountain’s own indigenous vocabulary, that is a better outcome, not a defeat.
There is a reason to trust the mountain’s own people on this. In a short film released under the Uganda Tourism Board’s Explore Uganda brand, the story of that climb is told not by the king but by one of the men who guided him. Most kings, he says, sit in a good place and eat good food; this one was different. He mentions, almost in passing, that he did not share the king’s language. The verdict that matters most about that ascent was delivered by a mountain man who had no reason to flatter anybody. King Oyo did not reach the summit alone, and the people who got him there have already given their view.
What should happen now?
The Uganda Wildlife Authority, the Ministry of Tourism, Wildlife and Antiquities, the custodians of the national gazetteer and Parliament should open a formal renaming process, beginning with consultation among the cultural institutions and communities of Kasese, Bundibugyo and Fort Portal.
And let the name carry an obligation. The king asked for climber safety and for the glaciers to be watched. A King Oyo Rwenzori Fund, financed from park revenue, could pay for the boardwalks and rescue capacity he requested and for permanent glacier monitoring, so that the peak carrying his name also carries out his instruction.
The sign bolted to the rock up there records the height as 16,763ft, 5,109 metres, the highest point in Uganda. It carries the crest of the Uganda Wildlife Authority. Everything on that sign is ours except the name.
Let the children of this country climb not toward a relic of a European court, but toward the memory of a young African king who walked up into the ice of his own homeland and asked the world to look at what it was losing.
Omukama atulize.
The writer is the head of research and development at the Ministry of ICT and National Guidance