The River Horse

The Zulu people call the hippopotamus imvubu.

As Credo Mutwa has pointed out, “This word has several meanings, one of which has to do with mixing several things in a container... In this sense, the word imvubu means ‘the mixed up creature’, or ‘the creature which is unable to make up its mind what it is’. It behaves like a crocodile, but it looks like a combination of a rhinoceros and an elephant.”

Although this is the stuff of legend, a hippo is indeed a unique animal: it is a terrestrial mammal whose closest relatives are whales and dolphins, a two-ton rotund mass that can sprint at 40kph, and a herbivore with tusks that play no part in feeding and are used entirely as weapons.

There are only two extant species of hippopotamus, and their name is derived from the ancient Greek , meaning ‘river horse’. Both the Common Hippopotamus (Hippopotamus amphibious) and the endangered Pygmy Hippopotamus (Choeropsis liberiensis) are today found only in Africa, although the fossil record reveals that their ancestors lived as far a field as Europe and the Middle East. The Pygmy hippo occurs only in isolated populations in West Africa, so the use of the word ‘hippo’ or ‘hippopotamus’ in this article refers only to the Common Hippopotamus (Hippopotamus amphibious) which occurs throughout the southern African sub-region.