The Phantom Mountain Range and King Kong

I remember when I first saw the Kong Mountain Range on a map of Africa. I held it up, questioning my geography. On this hand coloured copperplate engraved map, which was printed over 200 years ago, I saw what I was later to find out was a ‘Phantom Mountain Range’ stretching from Sierra Leone in the East to South Sudan in the West.

I later found out that this range was indeed a fraud. The mountain range was proclaimed to the Western world by James Rennel, a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, famous for his Bengal Atlas. With such credentials, it seems nobody doubted his discovery and he even won an award. It was in 1798 that he claimed the range to be the source of the great Niger River and several thousand kilometers’ away, the source of the White Nile, as well.

In an 1887 expedition, it took a French explorer Louis Gustave Binger to discredit the attribution. One can just imagine his surprise when he was expecting to find a continental divide that was reportedly 1 kilometre high and supposedly stretched thousands of kilometres, only to find a nondescript grouping of hills. Cartographers are notorious copyists and today there are over 50 versions of maps of Africa featuring the Kong Mountain Range. It was only a hundred years later that this ‘fake news’ mountain range was erased from the scientific realms of the cartographic world.

However, this story and what a story it is, has not entirely been erased from our social consciousness. As a boy the award winning film director, Merian Cooper read a book titled ‘Explorations and Adventures in Equatorial Africa’ by Paul Du Chaillu. It was in this book that Du Chaillu regaled of encounters with ‘a creature half man, half beast’. The origin of the name of the block buster movie is up for speculation, but to me, the legend of The Kong Mountain Range lives on with us today as the mythical home of the notorious monster Gorilla, King Kong!

I have sold originals of these maps in various sizes. They have been printed from as small as a postcard to as large as a square metre. The prices range from about R750 to R10,000 for this collectable curiosity.