7 - Between Ngàje Ngài and Kilimanjaro: A Rortian Reading of Hemingway’s African Encounters

Summary

LIKE NO OTHER AMERICAN ARTIST, Ernest Hemingway has left his literary mark on the iconic summit of Kilimanjaro. Hemingway’s admiration for the African region attracted worldwide curiosity. Particularly striking was his metaphorical use of the Masai expression Ngàje Ngài (“House of God”) to refer to the highest mountain on the continent. With “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936), Hemingway inspired readers to follow him in facing the essentials of life, either by means of an aesthetic transfer in the act of reading or quite literally by hiring a travel guide from Tanzania. Today, you can book a “Last Frontier Expedition” with Hemingway Tours & Safaris, buy “adventure clothes” from the Hemingway Travel Collection, and start your climb of Kilimanjaro at the Hemingway base camp, staying in a “tented accommodation [that] is luxuriously comfortable and spacious with en-suite bathrooms and … naturally, fully and tastefully furnished,” as the website promises. Ken Shapiro, editor of a travel magazine, has identified a trend labeled “tourism of doom” that encourages visits to endangered sites like Kilimanjaro’s shrinking ice cap. Hemingway’s short story regains prominence in light of recent theories on global climate changes, enabling us to ask if and how the reading of “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” today could activate an ecocritical attitude in the reader. In addition, one might ask why Hemingway’s African encounters are so effective in triggering a positive response to an unlikely hero such as Harry, who constantly quarrels, drinks, and blames others for his shortcomings?

This article will analyze Hemingway’s African encounters by emphasizing the literary strategies he used to authenticate cultural curiosity. This analysis will reveal a hidden frame of false promises played out between urban memories and constructions of an African wilderness. Methodologically, I will combine a Rortian reading of Hemingway’s African encounters with recent theories of ecocriticism. By tapping into the rich resources of aesthetics, ethics, and cultural theory, my reading will put to the test whether, as Lawrence Buell suggests, the power of imaginative literature can foster a climate of “transformed environmental values, perception and will” (vi).

Stereotypes and Means of Redemption

Texts can only answer those questions that have been put to them, and they can only answer them “as best they can” (Bode, 89). Each generation, however, asks different questions.