Mbuti Okapi Lore
The Deeper Tales of the Forest People
Among the Mbuti (the Efe, BaMbuti, and Asua clans who live inside the Ituri Forest), the okapi is never just an animal. It is a living ancestor, a border-guardian, and a trickster-judge all at once. They call it different names depending on the clan and the mood of the storyteller:
- O'api – the most common name, meaning "the one who steps over the boundary of the seen and unseen."
- Ngye ngboko – "grandfather of silence."
- Mokonda wa mbaso – "the knife that walks," because its stripes look like the white scars left on a warrior's legs after initiation cuts have healed.
The Mbuti say the okapi was the first creature to learn the secret of the forest: that true power belongs to whoever can be present without being noticed.
The Birth from the Broken Drum
In the beginning, say the old singers, the Creator beat a drum to call all animals into existence. Each beat made a new creature. On the seventh beat the drum split. From the crack fell a piece of red earth, a piece of night sky, and a piece of leftover moonlight. These three pieces rolled together and became the okapi.
Because it was born from a broken drum, the okapi has no voice. It cannot roar like the leopard, trumpet like the elephant, or even bleat like the duiker. Instead it took silence itself as its song. That is why even when you stand two arm-lengths away from an okapi in the forest, you will swear you are alone.
The Okapi and the First Death
Long ago, before people knew how to die properly, a young Mbuti hunter named Epoka tracked an okapi for seven days and seven nights. On the eighth morning he found it drinking from a pool of pure moonlight. Greedy, he shot an arrow into its heart.
The okapi did not fall. Instead it turned, looked at Epoka with eyes full of forest, and spoke the only words it has ever spoken to a human:
Instantly Epoka's shadow left his body and wrapped itself around the okapi's legs, making the black-and-white stripes. Epoka himself became the first human to grow old and die. The stripes you see today are the shadow of that first death. Every okapi carries it so that humans remember: death is borrowed, not stolen.
That is why Mbuti hunters, when they see okapi tracks, always pour a little palm wine on the ground and say, "We are only borrowing the forest for a little while. Take back what is yours when we are finished."
The Okapi Courts of Justice
When two Mbuti have a serious quarrel that the elders cannot settle (murder, adultery, or the breaking of a sacred hunting law), they go deep into the forest at new moon and perform the Ekotwe ceremony. They build a tiny hut of leaves no bigger than a cooking pot and leave inside it a piece of honey, a strip of bark-cloth dyed red, and one white chicken feather.
They sleep far away. If in the morning the tiny hut is crushed flat and the gifts are gone, the okapi has come. It has judged the matter in its silent court. Whatever the okapi decides cannot be argued with: the guilty person will sicken within one moon, or the innocent will find sudden luck in hunting. No one has ever dared lie after the okapi has judged, because the stripes on its legs are said to be the tallies of every lie ever told in the forest.
Why the Okapi Licks Its Own Shoulders
Mbuti children are told: the okapi constantly licks the oily fur on its shoulders because that is where it keeps the names of every plant that can heal. When a healer needs a rare medicine, they go alone into the forest and sing the "calling-back" song. If an okapi appears and licks its shoulder in their direction, the healer must follow at a distance.
The okapi will stop beneath the exact plant that holds the cure, strip one leaf with its midnight tongue, and leave it on the ground. The healer may take only that one leaf. To take more is to invite the forest to forget the healer's own name.
The Prophecy of the Red Ghost
The oldest living Mbuti singer, Mama Ayelengu of the Efe clan (who was already old when the first whites came looking for the "African unicorn" in 1901), tells this final story only when the moon is completely dark:
Those who treated the forest with respect will hear only gentle rain. Those who cut and burned will hear their own names screamed by the roots they murdered."
Then Mama Ayelengu taps out the rhythm of a broken drum on her knee and says:
"It is not hiding from us.
It is hiding for us."
