For years, leading up to their (sort of) discovery by Sir Harry Johnston, stories of an African unicorn had persisted. So when a group of pygmies was abducted, he was charged with their rescue in order to return them to their home in the Ituri Forest.
It was this group of pygmies who described the mysterious animal – which they called the o’api.
After Johnston returned the pygmies to their home, he made a stop at Fort Mbeni in the Semliki Forest. There, Lieutenant Meura gave him two okapi-skin bandoliers.
He was never able to find the animal, and after his group became ill, he abandoned the search, returning to Uganda. A year later, he received two skulls and a complete skin from Lieutenant Karl Erikson. In the note the lieutenant included, he described the hooves as cloven.
This note and the skulls told him two things: First, it wasn’t a horse because horses don’t have cloven hooves. The second was that, based on the shape of the skull, he believed it to be related to the giraffe.
Sadly, he never did see a living okapi on his adventures.
According to the Okapi Conservation Project:
Okapi derives from the name given to it by the Lese tribes local to the area of its discovery. They called it o’api, which is a compound of two Lese words, oka, a verb meaning to cut, and kpi, a noun referring to the design made on pygmy arrows by wrapping the arrow with bark so as to leave stripes when scorched by fire. The stripes on the legs of the okapi resemble these stripes on the arrow shafts. (Thanks to Michael Theys from Africa Freak for the info!)
