Fauna of Africa

Known for the enormous diversity and richness of its wildlife, Africa has a greater variety of large ungulates, or hoofed mammals (some ninety species), and freshwater fish (two thousand species) than any other continent. However, probably no group of animals is more identified with Africa than its flesh-eating carnivore mammals, of which there are more than sixty species. In addition to the better-known big cats, such as lions, leopards, and cheetahs, there are wild dogs, hyenas, servals (long-limbed cats), wildcats, jackals, foxes, weasels, civets, and mongoose.

The African Enigma

There are many theories as to why Africa has such an abundance of wildlife, and large wildlife at that. While early North American human societies drove mammoths, giant beaver, and saber-tooth tigers to extinction, early Europeans wiped out lions and rhinos, and Asians domesticated their landscapes, Africans lived in relative accord with creatures that were no less grand or ferocious. Some African folklore places animals on the same footing with people.

Another theory is that the tsetse fly, by spreading the sleeping sickness, made much of tropical Africa uninhabitable by humans and protected the wilderness and wildlife from human depredation. Still another possibility may have been the constancy and small size of the African population in comparison with European and Asian numbers—too few people to either overhunt large mammals or exhaust their habitat. One more possibility is that the savannas of Africa—grassy plains with scattered tree cover—provide good habitat for so many ungulates. Humans cannot hunt ungulates easily under these conditions because the humans can be seen and outrun easily. At the same time, a large population of ungulates supports an appreciable population of predators, such as lions, and scavengers, such as hyenas.

At one time, most African fauna was believed to have originated in the Palearctic regions, that is, Europe, northwest Africa, and much of Asia. There is no doubt that as recently as fifteen thousand years ago, a milder Saharan climate allowed typically Ethiopian forms, such as clariid catfish, to reach the river systems of North Africa. Similarly, northern animal life and vegetation seem to have extended far south into the Sahara. The white rhinoceros evidently coexisted with elklike deer.

The spread of forests during the wetter epochs created separate northern and southern wooded grasslands. This led to the evolution of such closely related northern and southern species of antelope as the kob and puku, the Nile and common lechwe, and the northern and southern forms of white rhinoceros. In earlier periods, animal life was even more remarkable than in modern times. Fossil deposits have revealed sheep as big as present-day buffalo, huge hippopotamuses, giant baboons, and other types similar to existing species. These “megafauna” probably lived in wetter periods and died out as the climate became drier.

Effects of Human Population Growth

The fine conditions for Africa’s fauna in the mid- to late-nineteenth century started to come to an end when European settlers arrived in many parts of Africa. Technologies, in the form of Western medicine and sanitation, sparked a demographic revolution. In places such as Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), the human population exploded twenty-fold during the ninety-year reign of White settlers.

The antelope, known as the Zambian black lechwe, believed to have numbered one million in 1900, was reduced to less than eight thousand by the late twentieth century. The population of African elephants declined from two million in the early 1970s to 600,000 by 1990, largely because of poaching for the ivory trade.

In 1970, the world's global black rhino population totaled 70,000, but by 1995, poaching reduced this number to 2,410. In the 2020s, their population had recovered to around 6,100. The African white rhinoceros reached the verge of extinction in 1980. In West Africa, the continual southward advance of the Sahara Desert has amplified the twin pressures of habitat destruction and human population. The larger fauna that lived there, caught between the desert and the burgeoning population, are largely gone.

In Kenya, farmers have long since cleared most of the central part of the country that was once a densely forested region inhabited by wild animals. Some people have invaded national parks for commercial purposes such as logging and cattle grazing, thus forcing wildlife out of their preserved habitats. Some animals have had no alternative but to fight with humans for food and water. Along the Kenyan coast, many people have been attacked and killed by charging hippopotamuses and crocodiles in search of food and space. Similar cases have been common in the highlands, where Kenyans lost their lives to charging elephants or to leopards and buffalo.

Human-elephant conflicts in Cameroon have been a major issue. Such conflicts are more acute in the savanna ecosystem, due to the loss of the elephant’s range and habitat following the conversion of natural vegetation to farmland and the logging of large tracts of forests. Cameroon still had a relatively large herd of elephants, estimated at about twenty thousand in 1997. Approximately 75 percent of these elephants lived in the dense equatorial forest. In 2020, the country reported its elephant population at 6,830.

Another issue in Cameroon in 1999 was a 652-mile (1,050-kilometer) pipeline proposed to traverse tropical rain forests and link oil fields in landlocked Chad to an export facility in Kribi, Cameroon. The original route of the pipeline was changed to go through two less-fragile ecosystems, but the new route was still designed to cut through tropical areas and provide easier human access to endangered species such as gorillas, chimpanzees, and elephants.

African Mammals

The main group of herbivores is the African antelope, which belong to four subfamilies of the ox family. The first subfamily is further subdivided into the African buffalo and the twist-horned antelope, including the eland (the largest of all antelope), kudu, nyala, and bushbuck. The second subfamily is the duiker, a small primitive antelope that lives in the thickets, bush, and forests. Other well-known large African herbivores include the zebra, giraffe, hippopotamus, rhinoceros, and the African elephant.

Africa’s large number of endemic or native mammal species is second only to that of South America. These include several families of the ungulate order Artiodactyla (mammals with an even number of toes), such as the giraffe and hippopotamus. Some carnivores—such as civets, their smaller relations, the genets, and hyenas—are chiefly African. The rodent family of jumping hares is endemic, and one order, the aardvark, is exclusively African. The Malagasy Republic (Madagascar) has a remarkable insect-eating family. These are the tenrecs, animals with long, pointed snouts. Some tenrecs are spiny and tailless.

The primates include about forty-five species of Old World monkeys and two of the world’s great apes: the chimpanzee and the world’s largest ape, the gorilla. The gorilla is present in two subspecies: the lowland gorilla of Central and West Africa and the mountain gorilla of East Africa. The rare mountain gorillas live only in the upland forest on the borders of Uganda, Rwanda, and Congo-Kinshasa (Zaire). There are two populations of roughly equal size. One is in Uganda’s Bwindi Impenetrable Forest National Park, where a 1998 census counted 292 gorillas. The second is in the Virunga Mountains, on the borders of the three countries. The last census there, completed in 1989, estimated 324 gorillas in the Virungas, but war prevented a recount for several decades. In the early twentieth century, conservation efforts in this area increased substantially, and, because of greater stability in the region, tourism surrounding the mountain gorillas increased the available funds for protecting them and their habitat. By the 2020s, mountain gorilla populations were estimated at just over one thousand and growing.

Presimian primates include pottos or African lemurs and galagos, bush babies, or small arboreal lemurs. These and other African lemurs tend to be small and nocturnal. In the Malagasy Republic, where there are no true monkeys, the lemurs have occupied all ecological niches, both diurnal and nocturnal, that the monkeys would have taken. Accordingly, the world’s most diverse collection of presimian lemurs survives in Madagascar.

African Reptiles, Birds, and Insects

Most African reptiles have their origins elsewhere—mainly in Asia. These include lizards of the agamid family, skinks, crocodiles, and tortoises. Endemic reptiles include girdle-tailed and plated lizards. Large vipers are common and diverse. Certain species have extremely toxic venom, but they are rarely encountered. One of the most noted is the black mamba. Amphibians also belong mainly to Old World groups. Salamanders and toothed tree frogs are confined to the Palearctic northwest Africa. Abundant and more common frogs and toads include such oddities as the so-called hairy frog of Cameroon, whose hairs are auxiliary respiratory organs.

The birdlife south of the Sahara includes almost fifteen hundred resident species. An additional 275 species either reside in northwestern Africa or are winter migrants from Europe. Once there may have been as many as two billion individual migrants, but their numbers have been reduced considerably by severe droughts and by human land use and predation. The few endemic bird species include the ostrich, shoebill, hammerkop, and secretary bird. The many predators of land mammals include eagles, hawks, and owls. Many more, such as storks, waders, and a few species of kingfishers, prey on fish. Even more feed on insects.

Insects include large butterflies, stick insects, mantises, grasshoppers, safari ants, termites, and dung beetles. Spiders abound throughout the continent, and scorpions and locusts can be plentiful locally. Huge swarms of locusts periodically spread over wide areas, causing enormous destruction to vegetation. Mosquitoes that carry malaria are present wherever there is a body of water. Female blackflies transmit the nematode Onchocera volvulus, a parasitic filarial or threadlike worm. This organism eventually collects in many parts of the body, including the head near the eye. Nematode clusters around the eyes cause a blindness known as “river blindness.” This disease has prevented any significant human habitation in many of Africa’s river valleys.

Tsetse flies carry the parasite that causes African sleeping sickness in humans and nagana in livestock. These flies are found in all tropical portions of sub-Saharan Africa. The controversial chemical pesticide, Dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane (DDT), which is banned in the West, is being used in Zimbabwe and other countries to eliminate the tsetse fly. DDT has adversely affected birds and fish there and has even been found in nursing mothers’ breast milk.

Changing Human Attitudes Toward Conservation

If people can benefit from wildlife, their attitudes and actions toward wildlife will improve. Starting in Namibia in 1967 and extending to Zimbabwe in 1975, lawmakers put the idea into action. Large landowners were allotted ownership rights to wildlife, an idea totally alien to the European and the United States’ tradition of exclusive state ownership. Landowners, for the first time since the imposition of colonial rule, were free to make economically informed—and, as it turned out, ecologically desirable—market decisions on how best to use their land. By 1990, 75 percent of Zimbabwean ranchers in areas too dry to support crop production had shifted partly or entirely to wildlife ranching. That change was due to the nearly quadruple net profit per acre advantage held by wildlife over cattle.

Rinderpest, a highly contagious bovine plague that has killed millions of Africa’s cattle, buffalo, and wildlife in the past century, is finally being brought under control. The disease was eradicated in West and Central Africa, and contained in most of East Africa in the 1990s. Rinderpest, caused by morbillivirus, attacks ungulates such as cows, sheep, buffalo, and giraffe and was almost always fatal. It is easily transmitted through direct contact and by drinking water contaminated with the dung of sick animals. It was believed to persist in Sudan, possibly Somalia, and about four other places in the world until 2011, when it became the second virus in history to be declared eradicated by the United Nations.

In Swaziland, pastoralists known as Shewula are breaking with tradition by giving more than 7,400 acres (3,000 hectares) of land used for grazing cattle to a large new game reserve. It will be part of a new transnational reserve with neighboring South Africa and Mozambique. In return, donors provided funds to build tourism facilities on the land and to train the community in conservation, management, and marketing skills. The goal was to develop the reserve’s tourism potential to benefit the rural villagers who chose wildlife over cattle. By 2020, conservation efforts improved the country's ability to protect farmers and wildlife while increasing tourism by opening Mkhaya Game Reserve and other similar reserves.

Similar arrangements have been made between an international hotel chain and a village community outside Tanzania’s Serengeti National Park. The agreement involved more than 25,000 acres (10,000 hectares) of land in the Loliondo buffer zone between the Serengeti and the Masai Mara of neighboring Kenya. The Loliondo corridor is used by thousands of stampeding wildebeest during their famed migrations between the Serengeti and the Mara.

Progress has been made in efforts to increase the elephant population. In East Africa, the numbers of elephants are slowly increasing after the poaching rampages of the 1980s. The areas around Tsavo National Park in Kenya and in neighboring Tanzania have reported a count of eighty-one hundred elephants, as opposed to about six thousand elephants in the late 1980s. In 1972, however, there were about twenty-five thousand elephants in the greater Tsavo area. The elephant conservation record of Namibia, Botswana, and Zimbabwe has been impressive. As of the summer of 1999, they had an estimated 200,000 elephants. By the 2020s, this conservation effort, which began in Zambia's Kafue National Park, was relocated to Hwange National Park in Zimbabwe. They estimated their elephant population to be approximately 220,000.

Principal Terms

Artiodactyls: Mammals with an even number of toes

Predator: A carnivorous animal that obtains food by hunting

Ungulate: A hoofed mammal

Bibliography

Disilvestro, Roger L., ed. The African Elephant: Twilight in Eden. John Wiley & Sons, 1991.

Estes, Richard Despard. The Behavior Guide to African Mammals: Including Hoofed Mammals, Carnivores, Primates. 20th ed. University of California Press, 2012.

Halliburton, Warren J. African Wildlife. Silver Burdett Press, 1992.

Jones, Robert F. African Twilight: The Story of a Hunter. Wilderness Adventure Press, 1995.

Kingdon, Jonathan. The Kingdom Guide to African Wildlife. 2nd ed. Princeton University Press, 2020.

Parks, Abby. "Africa." A-Z Animals, 13 Feb. 2023, a-z-animals.com/animals/location/africa. Accessed 10 July 2023.