No Picnic on Mount Kenya: A Daring Escape, A Perilous Climb

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Description

In 1943, Felice Benuzzi and two Italian compatriots escaped from a British POW camp in equatorial East Africa with only one goal in mind–to climb the dangerous seventeen-thousand-foot Mount Kenya. No Picnic on Mount Kenya is the classic tale of this most ordinary and thrilling adventure, a story that has earned its place as a unique masterpiece of daring and suspense.

Ethiopia, 1941. Felice Benuzzi used to be a junior officer in the Italian Colonial Service, stationed in Addis Ababa, when the British thwarted Mussolini’s ambition to build a colonial empire in East Africa. Benuzzi, along side thousands of other Italians, used to be captured and interned in a POW camp near the foot of Mount Kenya, where he and his countrymen languished indefinitely, waiting out the war and the desperate boredom, passivity, and isolation of prison life. “With the intention to break the monotony,” he writes, “one had only to start taking risks again.” But the isolation of the camp precluded the opportunity of escape to a neutral country: “I thought, then a minimum of I shall stage a break in this awful travesty of life. I shall try to get out, climb Mount Kenya and return here.” So begins No Picnic on Mount Kenya, a firstclass adventure story full of courage, humor, and exquisite detail.

Benuzzi and two fellow prisoners spent six months secretly hoarding food; sewing clothing, shoes, and tents; and scavenging for scrap metal to hammer into ice axes and crampons. After escaping, they braved the a couple of risks of capture, wild animals (including elephants and rhinoceros), starvation, frigid weather, and one of the most most challenging climbing conditions in Africa. The men ascended 16,300 feet to Mount Kenya’s Point Lenana, hoisted a homemade flag, and then returned to the misery of the camp. Benuzzi and his comrades never cared that their freedom used to be fleeting: they climbed Mount Kenya to reaffirm their humanity in the face of a barbaric world war. The gallantry of this gesture sets No Picnic excluding typical mountaineering stories of risk and self reliance. –Svenja Soldovieri

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