The Bakonjo name for the mountain seems to have been (and currently is) Kiyanja. On his June 1891 expedition into the Ruwenzori, Franz Stuhlmann observed the peak and named it either Semper or Ngemwimbi. Abruzzi renamed the mountain after Samuel Baker, a 19th-century British explorer who in 1864 was the first European to sight and visit Lake Albert, just northeast of the Ruwenzori Mountains, and who had reported to glimpse great mountainous masses away in the distance, to the south of Lake Albert.