THE INYALA 
TRAGELAPHUS ANGASI 
T HOUGH it may be classed among the bushbucks generically, 
the inyala deserves a few words to itself; for not only is it a king 
amongst its congeners, by reason of its much greater size, but 
it is also one of the most beautiful of all the African antelopes. 
A male inyala will stand from three feet four inches to three 
feet six inches at the shoulder, and in proportion to its size its 
horns are larger than in the smaller bushbucks, though of much the same 
fashion. Its ears are large and rounded, and its general colour a dark 
grey banded with a few faint white stripes. The lower part of the neck is 
covered with long shaggy hair, which extends to beneath the belly, and 
fringes the haunches to the knees. In the females, which are hornless, the 
general colour is bright red, with a dorsal ridge of black hair extending 
to the tail, whilst the white stripes on each side are more numerous and 
much more clearly defined than in the male. For a long time after the 
inyala was first brought to the notice of European naturalists by Mr George 
French Angas — after whom it was named Tragelaphus angasi in 1848 — 
its range was thought to be entirely confined to a small area of country 
to the north of St Lucia Bay in Zululand. Since then, however, it has 
been found to exist further up the coast of East Africa near Inhambani, 
as well as on the Lower Limpopo, near the mouth of the Oliphant’s 
River, and also in a restricted locality not far from Beira. Up to the 
present it has not been met with anywhere else to the south of the 
Zambesi except in the Gorongoza district, but north of that river it 
re-appears in the thick bush bordering the Moanza River, a tributary of 
the Shiri, in British Central Africa. Few other antelopes, however, appear 
to have so broken and so restricted a range as the inyala, as between 
Delagoa Bay and the Shire River, a distance of approximately six 
hundred miles, it is only found in three or four widely separated and very 
circumscribed localities. 
I have myself only met with inyala antelopes in a district to the south of 
Delagoa Bay, where their numbers had been very much reduced by the 
natives. The first two I saw were a buck and a doe together, and after 
that all I came across, whether bucks or does, were by themselves, and 
thus my small experience led me to think that this species was rather 
R 121 
