A Certain Curve of Horn: the Hundred-Year Quest for the Giant Sable Antelope of Angola

Natural History, March, 2003 by Laurence A. Marschall

by John Frederick Walker Atlantic Monthly Press, 2002 $26.00

Animals can compel our love or admiration. Some amuse us; some annoy us. But only a few can enchant. For some reason--their bearing, their elusiveness, the remoteness of their habitat--such special animals embody an idealized view of nature, becoming the locus of human projections of power, nobility, and sensitivity of near-mythic proportions. The bald eagle, the gray whale, and the snow leopard are three such creatures. And so is the giant sable antelope of Angola, the subject of John Frederick Walker's fascinating account, and a rare and endangered mammal that few people outside its homeland have ever heard of.

Any visitor to a game park in southern Africa can attest to the beauty of the common sable antelope, two races of which (Hippotragus niger kirkii and Hippotragus niger niger) roam the savannas from South Africa to Zambia. Jet black, with ramrod bearings and large arcs of heavy horn on their equine heads, they are a sight impossible to forget. But the giant sable (Hippotragus niger variani), whose horns are almost a foot longer than those of its common relatives--and whose markings are even more striking--has been seen in the wild by only a few naturalists. In the 1800s travelers heard rumors that such animals lived between the Zambezi River and the western coast of Africa, and an enormous horn, more than five feet long, mysteriously showed up in the University Museum of Natural History in Florence, Italy. But no European had ever seen the antelope in the flesh.

Hunters--and in the early decades of the twentieth century most naturalists were hunters--wanted not only to see the giant sables but to bag them. Following the discovery of a few herds of giant sables in central Angola by a British railway engineer, Frank Varian, just before the First World War, a few heads and hides made it to the trophy rooms and museums of the world, but sightings were sporadic. Until the 1970s, when the behavioral ecologist Richard D. Estes, now head of the International Conservation Union's Antelope Specialist Group, conducted the first (and only) field studies of the giant sable, little was known about its habits, how closely related it was to other species, or even the size of its population.

It didn't help that the homeland of the giant sable was deep in the center of Portuguese West Africa, one of the most repressive and neglected of the European colonies. Before the last decades of the twentieth century, the region was scarcely touched by modernization; Portugal's chief interest--until Angola achieved independence in 1975--seemed to be extracting as much mineral wealth as possible with the labor of an oppressed population, and then shipping it along the one railway (which Varian had helped build) that connected the frontier with the Atlantic coast.

But independence scarcely made things better. The pre-independence freedom fight degenerated into a civil war that tore the country apart for the rest of the century. By some estimates, more than a million Angolans died and some 12 million land mines were emplaced. In the ensuing chaos even the few naturalists who study the giant sable lost track of them. There was fear that many. of the antelopes had been caught in the crossfire: even though Angolans venerate the giant sable as an icon of their nationhood, the warring armies have been known to slaughter other endangered species for the lucrative profits that the animals' pelts, horns, and ivory bring on the black market--or simply for a bite to eat.

Has the giant sable survived? John Frederick Walker, a journalist who caught the enchantment of the animal in his youth, decided to find out for himself. The resulting book, a riveting account of his research and travels, recalls Peter Matthiessen's tale of a similar search for the snow leopard in the frigid Himalaya. But where Matthiessen struggled against inner ghosts, Walker mainly does battle with bureaucratic bungling and Third World corruption, making his book more a chronicle of the politics of conservation than a search for the meaning of life. It would spoil a wonderfully told story to reveal how it all comes out.