The Sudanese Giraffe Who Went to France: The Life and Afterlife of Zarafa, 1824-2024

In 1824, Muhammad Ali Pasha of Egypt ordered the capture of a baby giraffe from the Sudan, which his forces had conquered three years before. He then arranged to send her to the French king, Charles X, as a grand diplomatic gesture. Upon reaching Marseille in 1826, she became the first live giraffe to set foot in France and caused a sensation.

She inspired leading scientists and literati, as well as painters, designers, and members of the public, who were able to see her in the menagerie of Paris. Zarafa, as she later became known, died in 1845, but interest in her life persisted. Her stuffed skin entered a museum in Verdun, where she reportedly became a talisman for French soldiers during World War I. In 1931, she moved to La Rochelle, where she still stands in the natural history museum.

However, her mounted skeleton, which entered a museum in Normandy, perished in Caen during a World War II bombing. In 2009, the city of Marseille installed a park sculpture in her memory: a giraffe figure containing a book-exchange shelf in its torso. She received a bigger boost in 2012 with the debut of a fictionalized cartoon for children about her career – a film that alluded to the fraught history of Franco-Algerian relations.

Meanwhile, during the century and a half following her birth, giraffes in the Sudan, her native land, dwindled to extinction, the result of proliferating guns and overhunting. Today, there are no giraffes left in the territory ranging from Darfur in the west to the Ethiopian border in the east.

By considering the biography of Zarafa – her life and afterlife across two centuries – we can explore a multitude of histories. These illuminate contacts and exchanges between Egypt, the Sudan, and France; science and environmental change; developments in art and material culture; and human relationships with, and fascinations for, other animals.