 7  hinking hrough Memoryscapes: Symbolic Environmental Potency on Mount Kilimanjaro, Tanzania Timothy Clack Introduction Over the last decade there has been some outstanding research into ‘perceptions’ and ‘perspectives’ of African landscapes. 1 A common feature of these accounts, in the main from anthropology and environmental history, is the understanding that landscapes are made not through any process of sedimentation of history but through the continuous reworking of experience and future potentialities. 2 Landscapes are meaningful and are involved in the choreographing of identities and the gathering of cultural knowledge. he environment coordinates behaviour and understand- ings through processes of priming, memorialising and thinking. In this sense, landscapes are better conceptualised as being found rather than made. Moreover it has also been highlighted that one cannot write about a homogenised ‘African perception’, as perceptions are, of course, culturally varied and corresponsive. In addition memory and identity are inscribed by social practice. his chapter will highlight some examples of indigenous memoryscapes on Mount Kilimanjaro as they pertain to the loci of spiritual power, supernatural agency, attachment to land, ritual activities and religious experience. Kilimanjaro lies in the north-east of Tanzania near the international border with Kenya and is 1. Richard Werbner and Terrance Ranger (eds.), Postcolonial Identities in Africa, (London: Zed 1996), Terrance Ranger, Voices from the Rocks: Nature, Culture and History in the Matapos Hills of Zimbabwe, (Oxford: James Currey 1999), William Beinart and Joann McGregor (eds.), Social History and African Environments, (London: James Currey 2003). 2. Ute Luig and Achim von Oppen, ‘Landscape in Africa: Process and Vision’, Paideuma 43 (1997): 8–45.