{"id":862246,"date":"2026-08-20T17:24:12","date_gmt":"2026-08-20T17:24:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/862246\/"},"modified":"2026-08-20T17:24:12","modified_gmt":"2026-08-20T17:24:12","slug":"okapi-new-book-celebrates-a-once-famous-animal-and-recovers-indigenous-experts-place-in-its-history","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/862246\/","title":{"rendered":"Okapi: new book celebrates a once famous animal and recovers Indigenous experts\u2019 place in its history"},"content":{"rendered":"

As a child growing up in the Ndumo Game Reserve<\/a> on the South Africa-Mozambique border, Simon Pooley read an animal encyclopaedia given to his family by a visiting scientist. He became fascinated by the okapi, a striking animal from the Congo Basin rainforest. Decades later as a conservation scientist and environmental historian recovering from dengue fever contracted during research, he returned to that early interest. Visiting London Zoo<\/a>, he began investigating the okapi\u2019s history, discovering in the Zoological Society of London\u2019s library<\/a> the records of the first okapi remains and the first live okapi to reach the UK. Finding surprisingly few books on the animal, he began researching its story. We spoke to him about his new book, Discovering the Okapi<\/a>.<\/p>\n

What makes the okapi extraordinary?<\/p>\n

The okapi is the only living relative of the giraffe. They share characteristics, like head shape and ossicones (horns made of cartilage not bone), gait (two legs on the same side move together, then the other two), and a long purple tongue. But the obvious difference is that okapi don\u2019t have long necks, which would get entangled in dense rainforests. <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Also, where giraffe skins feature blotches of brown on a golden background, okapi have white faces and white stripes on their forelegs and hindquarters, with a gorgeous red-brown coat in between. Okapi have larger ears, and also communicate using infrasound<\/a>. This comes from their adaptation to life in the rainforest.<\/p>\n

Okapi are the only rainforest animal that eats leaves from trees only at medium height (never from the ground or treetops). However, these leaves are poisonous to protect them from herbivores, so okapi must eat many (over 100) different plant species to minimise buildups of any particular toxin. <\/p>\n

Why have African experts and Indigenous knowledge been left out of the okapi\u2019s story?<\/p>\n

My book shows<\/a> how western collectors relied completely on African trackers to locate okapi. Few saw a live wild okapi and instead, African trappers caught okapi in traps or pits, or expert hunters shot them for colonial collectors. <\/p>\n

Africans knew all about okapi for thousands of years, but Europeans only found out <\/a> about the animal in the late 1800s when an explorer was told that an animal resembling his donkey lived in the vast Ituri Forest<\/a> in the DRC near the borders of Uganda and South Sudan. This seemed strange as equids (horses, donkeys, zebras) eat grass. <\/p>\n

Read more:
\n Mining and armed conflict threaten eastern DRC\u2019s biodiversity in a complex web<\/a><\/p>\n

Harry Johnston, a British colonial official and naturalist, read this and decided to track down this mysterious animal. He took a job running Britain\u2019s Uganda Protectorate in 1899 hoping to find this animal. He never saw a live okapi but acquired okapi skin bandoliers<\/a> and sent them to London \u2013 the first material evidence of okapi to arrive in the UK. When he later acquired two skulls and examined the teeth, he realised the animal was a giraffid<\/a> (a hoofed mammal in a family whose only surviving members are okapi and giraffe).<\/p>\n

Read more:
\n DRC\u2019s plan for the world\u2019s largest tropical forest reserve would be good for the planet: can it succeed?<\/a><\/p>\n

Westerners travelled to the Congo to find this gorgeously coloured giraffid, the size of a small horse, living in the rainforest. However, they were unable to find okapi or learn about their habits without the help of local African hunters and trackers.<\/p>\n

Although I found that they recorded this in their diaries and letters, European newspaper reports and scientific journals never mentioned these African okapi experts. My book recovers their stories and the role of indigenous knowledge. <\/p>\n

Read more:
\n African communities have a lot of knowledge to share: researchers offer alternatives to Eurocentric ways of doing things<\/a><\/p>\n

Westerners learned basic natural history information from Africans, including which plants okapi do and don\u2019t eat, that females have no (visible) horns and that they lick clay deposits to ingest minerals. They also learned that okapi mothers leave calves hiding in clearings in dense vegetation, to feed, returning to groom and suckle them. <\/p>\n

\"A<\/a><\/p>\n

Indigenous hunter Abawe c.1915 with an okapi he hunted for a colonial explorer.
\n Herbert Lang.<\/p>\n

My book describes how the Azande hunter Abawe, and Mbuti hunter Makulu-kulu, used this knowledge of okapi parenting behaviour to catch live okapi calves for Europeans. I document how, for example, when colonial okapi supplier Patrick Putnam acquired a live okapi calf from Mbuti hunters, and it refused to feed, it was the Mbuti man Sale who explained that okapi would not eat off the ground. After he hung up the leaves using climbing vines, the okapi fed greedily. <\/p>\n

How did colonialism devastate okapi populations?<\/p>\n

\"An<\/a><\/p>\n

14 August 1935 edition of the US newspaper Pampa Daily News.<\/p>\n

My book documents how by the late 1800s, Africa had been parcelled out<\/a> among European colonial powers. What is now the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) was one of the last to be claimed. Belgium\u2019s King Leopold II<\/a> brutally persecuted<\/a> the country\u2019s Indigenous people to extract<\/a> ivory and rubber. <\/p>\n

His colonial government gave okapi as gifts to European kings and governments to distract from their atrocities. My study of colonial archives found that from January 1947, the Belgian colonial government set up a Groupe de Capture et d\u2019Elevage d\u2019Okapis (Okapi Capture Group) so that the animals could be caught and sold to buyers in Europe and the US. Most okapi died on the way or soon after arriving.<\/p>\n

The greater damage of colonialism, however, was sowing the seeds of instability in the region, mainly to retain access to its vast mineral wealth. This remains the case today, as in addition to copper, cobalt<\/a> is used in computers, mobiles and car batteries. Colonial-era misconceptions about Africans also still distort okapi conservation interventions today. <\/p>\n

What needs to be done to protect the okapi today?<\/p>\n

\"Parent<\/a><\/p>\n

Historian John Bond sent this postcard to his daughter, botanist Elsa Pooley (Simon Pooley\u2019s mother) in 1957.<\/p>\n

Today, nobody knows how many okapi are left in the DRC forests. Okapi can only be preserved in the rainforests of north-eastern DRC. They were declared endangered<\/a> in 2015, and no okapi surveys have been possible since then because of the ongoing violence<\/a> in the DRC.<\/p>\n

The okapi has been bred in zoos<\/a> for 70 years, but this has not been successful<\/a>. There are still too few captive okapi to maintain enough genetic diversity. Captive okapi also differ significantly from those living in the wild.<\/p>\n

The biggest current threats to the okapi are forest clearance, mainly for mining, timber and charcoal, and hunting for bushmeat and skins. <\/p>\n

Read more:
\n Bigfoot, the Kraken and night parrots: searching for the mythical or mysterious<\/a><\/p>\n

Two conservation NGOs in the DRC are working to save the okapi, the Okapi Conservation Project<\/a> and Wildlife Conservation Society<\/a>, working with the DRC\u2019s conservation authority Institut Congolais pour la Conservation de la Nature<\/a> and local people. If successful, the DRC government and partners\u2019 plan to create the Kivu-Kinshasa Green Corridor<\/a> will protect core okapi habitat.<\/p>\n

Individuals, and zoos and museums with okapis or their remains, can spread awareness about this amazing animal, once famous in the west. Companies benefiting from the DRC\u2019s minerals should be encouraged to contribute to conserving its national animal.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"As a child growing up in the Ndumo Game Reserve on the South Africa-Mozambique border, Simon Pooley read…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":862247,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[64,63,128,338],"class_list":["post-862246","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wildlife","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-science","tag-wildlife"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/862246","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=862246"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/862246\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/862247"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=862246"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=862246"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=862246"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}