Damaliscus lunatus jimela

Khushboo Et Rahul - Nature and wildlife photograph
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Damaliscus lunatus jimela
Damaliscus lunatus jimela

The word tope or topi is Swahili, and was first recorded in the 1880s by the German explorer Gustav Fischer from the ancient city island of Lamu off the Kenyan coast to refer to the local topi population in that region, now separated as Damaliscus lunatus topi. Contemporaneously, in English sportsmen referred to the animal as a Senegal hartebeest, as it was considered the same species as what is now recognised as D. lunatus korrigum.

Other names recorded in East Africa by various German explorers were mhili in Kisukuma and jimäla in Kinyamwezi. The Luganda name was simäla according to Neumann, or nemira according to Lugard.

By the turn of the 19th century this antelope was called a topi by most in English.[6][7][8] Writing in 1908, Richard Lydekker complains that it would have so much simpler if all these new forms of korrigan had simply been called East African korrigan, Bahr-el-Ghazal korrigan, etc., than constantly adopting different native names for different geographic forms of essentially the same antelope.

In 2003 Fenton Cotterill argued the correct name for jimela topi was nyamera in English, referencing that to the 1993 Kingdon field guide, which reports it as another Swahili name for topi antelopes.

New names invented in 2011 for various populations of this subspecies were Serengeti topi, Ruaha topi and Uganda topi

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Taken on: November 1, 2021
Sets appears in:   • Dawn to Dusk    • Wildlife   
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