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| Location: |
Africa - Western Africa - Central African Republic |
| Subject: |
Distribution - Records |
| Species: |
African Rhino Species |
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Probably the least-known country in Africa today, with large areas of savanna woodland still unexplored, the Central African Republic has been thought, until recent times, to harbour the two genera of African rhinoceroses: Ceratotherium simum cottoni, the northern white rhino; and Diceros bicornis longipes, the West African black rhino. Despite the belief in the presence of the white rhino, few specimens are known to have been collected in the country, and records of its former occurence are rare.
In 1932, M. Lavauden, the French Conservator responsible for central and western Africa, summarised some of the information concerning the occurrence of the northern white rhino. This suggested that its range extended from just north of Lake Albert in Uganda, northwest along the border between the Sudan and the Central African Republic (formerly Oubangui-Chari), as far as Coz Beida in Tchad (Figure 1). In 1927, the French Commission Sup?rieur de la Chasse was informed that the white rhino no longer existed in French territories (but then, somewhat illogically, it was given absolute protection by a law dated 25 August 1929) (Lavauden, 1934).
However, in 1927 the British Sudan border post at Dj?n?n? seized a larger number of white rhino horns alleged to have come from Tchad, which were probably the 150 which Guy Babault saw in Khartoum and which were reported as originating from Abecher (Lavauden, 1934). Malbrant (1952) records seeing horns of this genus in the hands of merchants at Birao in l933, and three years earlier apparently saw one on the Aouk to the north of Birao (Malbrant, 1930). Lavauden (1932) considered that there was no doubt that small numbers of white rhino existed at that time southeast of Abecher in the region of Coz Beida; further, a museum horn of this genus comes from east of Mangueigne in Tchad. Lavauden also supposed that the rhino to the northeast and east of Yalinga was the white, and in 1934 he noted a white rhino killed northwest of Zemio.
Gromier (1941) wrote that he saw horns of the white variety from Birao in 1931, and that a few years before 1941 he had seen several from the Vakaga region. He considered the white rhino to be probably extinct, although there were reports at that time that it still existed at Lake Mamoun, and between the Ouandjia and Vakaga Rivers. The Hunting Inspector, who was known under the pen-name of Saint-Floris, aptly summed all up by calling the white rhino `the Loch Ness monster of French Equatorial Africa' (Gromier, 1941).
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The rhinos of the Central African Republic
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