and the author of Burning Table Mountain: An Environmental History of Fire on the Cape Peninsula.
Pooley applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Discovering the Okapi: Western Science, Indigenous Knowledge, and the Search for a Rainforest Enigma, and reported the following:
On page 99, I explain how in 1902, the German Egyptologist Alfred Wiedemann created the myth that Ancient Egyptians depicted the okapi (discovered in 1901), identifying it with the god Set (the identity of this god’s sacred animal was disputed). Wiedemann claimed okapi had once inhabited the Nile valley. This was perhaps an unsurprising claim considering that Egyptology was in vogue in Europe at this time. In the previous page I note that both Bible scholars and eugenicists sought evidence for their stories and theories in the evidence being unearthed by Egyptologists in this period.Learn more about Discovering the Okapi at the Johns Hopkins University Press website.
On page 99, I also discuss the earliest of several rebuttals of this idea that the okapi is depicted in Ancient Egyptian art. One rebuttal is based on habitat: the okapi is a rainforest species (never found in the Nile Valley) and Set was associated with the desert. Another argument notes that the depicted okapi are missing key anatomical features (no horns; Set is male). This seems surprising given the Ancient Egyptians’ incredibly lifelike depictions of the region’s fauna.
Ford Madox Ford’s test doesn’t reveal the contents or intentions of my book particularly well. The chapter it comes from, “Okapis in African Art, Ancient and Modern”, is somewhat of an outlier in a book focused more on Western scientific and popular representations (and misrepresentations) of the okapi, and the peoples who first taught them about this mysterious rainforest giraffid – as well as the current state of okapi knowledge, keeping and conservation.
The chapter touches on cryptozoology, the international society of which adopted the okapi as its emblem. Supposedly, the discovery of the okapi was a vindication of the cryptozoologists’ method: the discovery of myths about fantastical animals which lead to the discovery of an actual undiscovered species. Harry Johnston, in this interpretation, discovered the okapi based on ‘parataxa’ (fragmentary evidence, physical or verbal), including travellers’ tales of a rainforest unicorn, Mbuti peoples’ report of a rainforest equid, and bandoliers of stripy okapi skin. Harry however sought more evidence, leading to the identification and description of the okapi, dispensing with unicorn myths. The okapi is of course wondrous and strange enough in real life, without association with unicorns, or Ancient Egyptian gods (regrettably, this latter story persists).
This episode chimes with my larger theme on the entanglement of various kinds of knowledge in the discovery of species for Western science, notably African indigenous knowledge about okapi.
--Marshal Zeringue
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