But how many people have heard about Ali from the Bornean region of Sarawak, now part of present-day Malaysia, who worked as Wallace’s assistant during his research in Southeast Asia between 1855 and 1862?

Ali’s case is just one of the many examples of academic colonialism committed by primarily Western researchers, who dismissed the work and roles of their local contributors in the regions where they were researching, regions that generally fall under what is now called the Global South.

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But academia is seeing growing efforts to acknowledge and even involve local collaborators more in the knowledge production process.

The contributions from local people like Ali have become known only in recent years, decades since the work of the Western scientists they assisted have basked in the spotlight.

In the 2015 article “‘I am Ali Wallace’: The Malay Assistant of Alfred Russel Wallace”, historian John van Wyhe and anthropologist Gerrell Miles Drawhorn estimated that the Sarawakian man might have collected 5,150 birds of the 125,660 natural history specimens included in Wallace’s collection of insects, birds, reptiles, mammals and mollusk shells.

Aside from collecting bird specimens, van Wyhe and Drawhorn wrote that Ali made major contributions to Wallace’s understanding of the Malay Archipelago, which led the British naturalist to discover the standardwing bird-of-paradise (Semioptera wallacii).

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