Size large; height at withers nearly 4 feet. General colour dark chestnut-rufous; front of face, outer sides of shoulders, and hips black. Chin and end of muzzle paler than cheeks. Belly purplish rufous, the groins and back of horns only white. Limbs with the dark colour of shoulders and hips passing round them just above knees and hocks; below these the legs are all reddish brown. Tail with its tuft reaching to the hock, its base like the back, its crested terminal half black.
Face-hairs reversed up to horns. No glandular suborbital brushes.
Skull-measurements of an adult male:—basal length 14·9 inches, greatest breadth 6·2, muzzle to orbit 10·8.
Horns cylindrical, evenly curved, starting outwards and backwards, gradually turning inwards and backwards. There is also a slight lyration of the horns, so that both points and bases are directed a little upwards, the general lunate curve being thereby disturbed. Good male horns attain a length of 14 or 15 inches, with a basal circumference of 7 or 8.
Hab. S.E. Africa, north of the Orange River up to the Zambesi, and westward to the district of Lake Ngami.
The Sassaby is a fine large Antelope well known to the sportsmen of South-east Africa. Though it certainly belongs to this group, it is rather isolated by the peculiar form of the horns, which somewhat resemble those of the Tora. It nearest allies are no doubt the Blessbok and Bontebok, which, however, it considerably exceeds in stature, being nearly as big as a Hartebeest.
The first discovery of the Sassaby is due to the researches of the celebrated African traveller, Dr. William J. Burchell. On the 10th of July, 1812, when on the Makkwárin River, in what is now the Orange Free State, Burchell’s hunters obtained a single specimen of an Antelope which was at once recognized as “new,” and was subsequently described in the second volume of the author’s ‘Travels’ (published in 1824), as the “Crescent-horned Antelope, Antilope lunata” Burchell states that it seemed to be an extremely scarce animal, as he never met with it again during the whole of his journeyings, the fact being that he had only just entered within the southern boundary of the range of this species. Burchell’s typical specimen, or rather portions of it, viz. the frontlet and horns, is still in the National Collection, to which he presented it.
Between the period of the discovery of the Sassaby by Burchell and the publication of its description this Antelope attracted the attention of another observer, Samuel Daniell, an artist who accompanied Dr. Somerville on two expeditions into the interior of the Cape Colony early in the present century. One of the copperplates engraved by William Daniell from the drawings made by his deceased brother Samuel, and published in 1820, gives a good representation of this species, which is stated in the accompanying letterpress to be “an Antelope, heretofore not described, found in the Booshwana country.” But no further particulars are given of it.
Hamilton-Smith, in his volume on the Ruminants, published in Griffith’s Translation of Cuvier’s ‘Règne Animal,’ correctly brought together Daniell’s “Sassaby” and Burchell’s Antilope lunata under one head and added a copy of Daniell’s figure.
Except in the quotations of its names by various systematists we find little more recorded of the Sassaby until 1840, when Capt. W. Cornwallis Harris gave an excellent account of it in his beautiful work on the ‘Game and Wild Animals of Southern Africa.’ This experienced sportsman and artist devoted one of his life-like plates to the representation of this Antelope, with which he had made himself well acquainted. “The Sassaybe,” he tells us, “like its congener, the Hartebeest, delights in the neighbourhood of hills, frequenting the open country with island-looking mimosa-groves, as well as the patches of scraggy forest that skirt the foot of many of the superior mountain ranges, which, however, neither species ever ascends. Among the parks of mokaala trees about the Cashan and Kurichane mountains we constantly saw them.” The painted skins of the Sassaby were in those days, Harris tells us, “in great request amongst the savages for kobos or leathern mantles, as well on account of their brilliant colours as from their extreme suppleness.” In this article of dress, Harris tells us, "the shining black tail, opened and squeezed flat, was usually fastened on so as to depend like a queue from the back of the neck, and the universal admiration in which this elegant appendage was held rendered its wearer the subject of many a quarrel.”