THE CAPE HARTEBEEST 
BUBALIS CAMA 
T HIS animal, the first of its genus to be met with by the Dutch 
settlers at the Cape in the middle of the seventeenth century, 
owes its name — which has now become the generic term 
applied to all its congeners as well — to the imagination of these 
people, and at the present day no one seems to know positively 
the exact signification of this compound word. Beest — bees, I 
believe, in low Dutch — means ox; of that there is no doubt; and “hart” 
means hard, and one old Boer with whom I was well acquainted a 
long time ago, and who was born in the Cape Colony very early in the 
nineteenth century, assured me that the “ hart ” in hartebeest — the 
Boers pronounce this word in the singular more like “ harrtbees ” than 
“ hartebeest ” — simply meant “ hard ” or “ tough,” i.e., “ difficult to 
kill,” the whole name signifying an ox -like animal which was very 
tenacious of life. But whether this is the true signification of the word 
“ hartebeest ” will never now be known with any certainty. 
The Cape hartebeest (which, after the discovery of the Tsessebe, which 
was named the bastard hartebeest, came to be known as the “ rooi ” or 
red hartebeest) was once a very common species in all the western portions 
of the Cape Colony from Cape Agulhas to the Orange River, as well as in 
Griqualand, the Orange Free State, the Western Transvaal, the Kalahari, 
Bechuanaland, the Bechuanaland Protectorate and Basutoland, and 
in the upland districts of Natal and Zululand. To-day, however, it is 
undoubtedly the rarest of all the hartebeests, as it has been exterminated 
over the greater part of its range. 
It is still found, however, in the parched and arid district known as 
Bushmanland in the north-west of the Cape Colony, and from there 
northwards through the Kalahari to beyond Lake N’gami. A few have also 
been preserved on enclosed farms in the north of Natal, and on ground 
belonging to the De Beers Company near Kimberley. 
There can be no doubt, I think, that the Cape hartebeest is very closely 
related to the Lelwel, especially to the Jackson’s race of the latter species. 
The skulls of the two species are, I believe, indistinguishable, and the 
same may be said of the horns, as the same individual variations occur in 
both; so that although a considerable difference may be apparent between 
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