Sibusiso Vilane, Adventurer and climate change activist

Born in Mpumalanga, South Africa, adventurer and climate change activist Sibusiso Vilane started his career as a game ranger with no inclination at all that he would become the first black African to summit the world’s highest mountain, Mount Everest.

Since breaking that record in 2003, and among many other adventures, Vilane has completed the Explorers Grand Slam – reaching the North and South Poles and climbing the Seven Summits – the highest peak on each of the world’s seven continents.

Vilane told how his life changed when as a game ranger in Swaziland (now Eswatini) in 1996, he met John Doble, who became a friend and was instrumental in finding the necessary sponsorship for Vilane's first Mount Everest expedition.

When he met Doble he had never heard of the Himalayas, the Asian mountain range that includes Everest. He was also bemused at the way in which white people seemed to enjoy hiking and mountain climbing, starting out a day chipper only to return tired and looking miserable.

Doble told Vilane about the annual attempts to reach the summit of the 8 849m mountain since 1953 when Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay were the first to conquer the world’s highest peak and asked Vilane an important question: “Do you have the desire to do it?”

Outside resources, such as sponsorships when it comes to mountaineering, are important, said Vilane, but it is an individual’s inner resources that are of most consequence.

“Do we have the will to fight this climate change battle?” he asked.

Vilane said when he made his first – successful – attempt at becoming the first black African to reach the summit of Everest in 2003, he expected to find the mountain strewn with litter. This was because much of the research he did mentioned that years of summit attempts from many individual expeditions had led to everything from oxygen bottles to corpses being abandoned on its slopes.

He was pleasantly surprised. Hillary and others had campaigned to have rubbish removed from the peak – an effort that continues to this day.

“What did they have? They had resources and equipment, but they also had something much more important: the will,” Vilane said.

Nevertheless, when he returned to the world's highest mountain, to climb it from the more difficult north side, he saw the corpses of eight unlucky climbers, newly exposed because the ice that covered the peak was melting. “So I realised that climate change is upon us,” he said.

Since then, Vilane has conquered the Seven Summits and took part, with fellow adventurer Alex Harris, in South Africa’s first unassisted trek to the South Pole. They dragged sleds over “1 200km of ice-covered wasteland”, all of that time not seeing any sign of humanity other than themselves.

Antarctica is so clean because “many, many years ago” people from across the world came together and agreed to keep the continent free of permanent human habitation, he said of the 1959 Antarctic Treaty. The agreement set Antarctica aside as a scientific preserve and banned military activity on the continent and in its surrounding seas.

Likewise, to battle climate change, the world needs to act together, Vilane said.

He moved on to speak of his many trips to the top of Africa’s highest mountain, Tanzania’s Kilimanjaro, starting in 1999 when the glaciers that cover the mountain reached far further down its sides than they do now.

Showing photos that he has taken of Kilimanjaro over many years, Vilane asked: “What picture are we leaving behind [of the world and humanity’s stewardship of it]?”

Carrying on in the same vein, Vilane took the audience through his trip to the North Pole in 2012; his climb up South America’s highest mountain, Argentina’s Aconcagua; and his 2019 return to the slopes of Mount Everest.

The 2019 trip shocked and frightened him. Many of the icefields he had previously climbed were gone and, as soon as the sun rose, “raging rivers” of melted ice crashed down the mountainside.

“Climate change’s effects are happening right in front of our eyes. I ask myself the question, will people in the future be able to have the same experiences that I have had? I don't think so.

“For me, climate change is here, it’s real and I have seen it with my own eyes. It is happening at a faster pace than we realise … We need to act and we need to do it now, at the pace that is needed.”

He called on everyone in the audience to ask themselves if they, and their organisation, was acting with the requisite haste. “Do we have the desire to do something, or do we just talk about it?”