1000 Francs CFA Okapi

The okapi wasn't confirmed to Western science until 1901, when British explorer P.L. Sclater formally described the species from skins obtained in the Belgian Congo — an animal so unfamiliar that early reports were dismissed as local folklore about a forest zebra. The Republic of the Congo has no wild okapi population; the animal is native to the dense Ituri rainforest of the Democratic Republic of the Congo to the east, making its appearance here a borrowed icon rather than a national one.