As regards the mammalian fauna and some of the more striking or peculiar of African birds, Barotseland, east of the Upper Zambezi, appears, in common with all the rest of South Central Africa up to the east coast of Lake Nyasa and down to the main course of the Zambezi, to be deficient as compared with Portuguese West Africa, South Africa, and (in a lesser degree) Moçambique. It probably has more in common as a distributional area with the southern part of the Congo basin outside the forest area, and west of the Luapula-Lualaba streams. Down to recent times Barotseland possessed great herds, enormous numbers of a few species of game animals, but not such a great variety of species. Like South Congoland outside the forest zone, it seems never to have had any example of the rhinoceros: indeed, I have no confirmatory evidence of the existence of a rhinoceros or a giraffe, west of the eastern rise of the Nyasa-Tanganyika plateau, or of the waters of Lake Nyasa. The rhinoceros begins to show itself south of Lake Nyasa and east of the Shire river. It recurs in Southern Angola and Damaraland, up to the vicinity of the Western Zambezi, and as far north as the beginning of the lofty plateaux where the Kwanza river rises.
The Kwanza, which divides Angola into two unequal portions, is very noteworthy as a boundary. Its ultimate sources are in the Ngangela, Bihé and Lujazi highlands (plateaus and mountains) which connect the mountain ranges of Benguela on the west with the 5,000-feet-high plateau dividing the Southern Congo basin from that of the Zambezi. This undulating line of heights (rising on several peaks to nearly 8,000 feet) really marks off Southern from Northern Angola; and zoologically Southern Angola extends eastwards almost to the banks of the Upper Zambezi and covers the western limits of Barotseland.
Here you have a remarkable extension of the South African area of zoological distribution. East of this, from the Upper Zambezi to the Shire river and the east coast of Lake Nyasa (with the Zambezi as a southern boundary) there is an interruption in distributional area which affects certain mammals and birds very curiously. For some the interruption is complete. The Ostrich, the true Gazelles, the Oryxes, the Secretary bird, certain types of Vulture, the Striped Hyena, the Chita or Hunting Leopard, the Caracal Lynx, the Aard Wolf (Proteles), the Big-eared Fox (Otocyon), the small Desert Foxes, the Black-backed Jackal, the Pedetes or Cape Jumping Hare, the Elephant-shrews, the Mountain Zebras, the White Rhinoceros and, in a lesser degree, the Black, are in a measure confined to north-east and eastern Equatorial Africa on the one hand, and to Africa south of the Zambezi and to Southern Angola on the other. Some of the examples cited stretch across to the Bahr-al-ghazal and even Northern Nigeria from Abyssinia and the Eastern Sudan; others reach Senegal and Western Nigeria beyond the forest zone. But all of the examples cited (besides many more less well-known birds and mammals) seem to be absent from North Angola, Northern Zambezia and Nyasaland, and apparently also from Moçambique. In Moçambique, numerous forms may have been exterminated by the white man and the black hunters, who began shooting here in the 17th century. Yet it is difficult to understand that they could thus have eliminated the Ostrich, Springbok, Striped Hyena (represented in South Africa and Angola by the Brown Hyena), Chita, Caracal, Aard Wolf, and Pedetes rodent, or even the Giraffe.
The Giraffe’s distribution conforms somewhat, but not so closely, to similar restrictions. Its least specialized form, perhaps, is the Reticulated Giraffe of Somaliland, whereon the original markings are seen to be white stripes, horizontal and perpendicular, on a red ground. From Somaliland the Giraffe radiates over the eastern Sudan to Northern Nigeria and thence (with gaps) to Senegal. It entirely avoids forested Central and West Africa, though it has a near relation, the Okapi, in the forests of Equatorial Africa east and north of the main Congo river. The distribution of the Giraffe continues south from Uganda and Somaliland to the east of Tanganyika and Nyasa down to the neighbourhood of the Ruvuma river. It has never been reported south of that stream, or until the Lower Zambezi has been crossed. A hundred years ago and down to about 1900 it was found in various sub-species and varieties south and west of the Zambezi to Cape Colony and into Southern Angola. But it has never been shown to exist between the Upper Zambezi and the Moçambique coast, north of that river system.
On the other hand the range of the Sable Antelope does not leave out Northern Zambezia and Barotseland. It begins in Eastern Africa, in the latitude and neighbourhood of Mombasa (a fact first suggested in my book on Kilimanjaro, published in 1885), broadens over what was formerly “German East Africa,” passes round the south end of Tanganyika into Southern Congoland and crosses Barotseland into Eastern Angola. Here, in the south-eastern basin of the Kwanza, and possibly in north-western Barotseland as well, it develops its most superb form—Hippotragus variani, generally called the Giant Sable—with magnificently developed horns, longer than those of any other type found elsewhere, and a longer, narrower skull. It is possible (from heads I once saw, shot to the west of the main Upper Zambezi and specimens of horns) that the Giant Sable may be found just within the limits of Barotseland.[3]
North of the belt of dense forest between the Liba and Kabompo, on the spongy plains near to the river, Livingstone noticed in the rainy season large numbers of Buffaloes, Elands, Kudus, Roan Antelopes, Gnus, and other game. He even avers that farther north he saw a White Rhinoceros. It was on a Sunday and his encampment was almost surrounded by herds of astonished Mpala antelopes, tsesebes (“bastard hartebeests”), zebras and buffaloes. But although the Black Rhinoceros is undoubtedly found in Southern Angola close up to the Barotse frontier, and the White has been shot immediately south of the Upper Zambezi, no word has come from any other quarter as to the existence of the monstrous White square-lipped species in the direction of the Upper Zambezi and the Congo watershed; so it is possible his eye-sight was deceived.
Giant Sable Antelope, from Angola
(From a specimen in the Museum of the New York Zoological Society presented by John Jay Paul.)