When I was writing about rhinoceroses recently, I noticed that even some of the most respectable sources of information repeated the story of why the White Rhinoceros is called that. Fitting into the category of what every schoolboy and schoolgirl knows, the story was that because the animal is not white, the ‘white’ is derived from the word ‘wyd’ (‘wide’) used by the Boers on account of its wide mouth compared with that of the Black Rhinoceros.
Before getting into evidence that was gleaned nearly 20 years ago which blew that idea out of the water, it did to me sound rather far-fetched. In the wild, you are most likely to see a rhino from the side or the rear and if you are faced close-up for a frontal view, the last thing you would be worrying about would be the width of its mouth.
Kees Rookmaaker of the Rhino Resource Centre in Cambridge looked at the history of the name, various suggestions of how the name came about and why the explanation based on the Afrikaans word ‘wyd’ is ‘unsubstantiated and historically incorrect’.
Rookmaaker outlined ten explanations of how the White Rhino may have acquired its name, a name in use in South Africa as a distinction from ‘Black’ since the earliest decades of the 19th century. I will concentrate on just the one.
It was the soldier turned game warden and herpetologist Charles Robert Senhouse Pitman, DSO, MC (1890–1975) who in 1931 was the first to suggest that ‘white’ was a corrupted version of a Dutch word meaning ‘bright’ or ‘shining’ in reference to its smoother hide. Then, it having been pointed out to him that there was no such Dutch word, he offered instead ‘widg’ meaning ‘great’. Pitman’s suggestion was soon buried when ‘widg’ was shown not to exist in Dutch. However, the idea of a word from Afrikaans was resurrected when Antwerp Zoo received its first specimens of the northern White Rhino by the zoo’s director, Walter van den Bergh in 1952. With his knowledge of Dutch he suggested that ‘white’ emerged from the word ‘wijde’ meaning wide.
Walter van den Bergh, who was director of Antwerp Zoo from 1946 until 1978, was influential and very well known internationally so it is perhaps not surprising that his explanation was repeated until it became the common, perhaps only, explanation from the 1960s onwards. A meme was up and running.
Kees Rookmaaker with his first-hand knowledge of Dutch knew that the present-day Dutch word wijd, which earlier might have been spelt ‘weit, weid, wyd or wyt’, corresponds to ‘wide’ in English. However, for small objects or anatomical parts the Dutch equivalent of broad, ‘breed’ is used. Therefore, the other name for the White Rhino, Square-lipped Rhinoceros, is breedlipneushoorn in Dutch and breëliprenoster in Afrikaans.
Rookmaaker argued that if ‘white’ was corrupted from the Dutch or Afrikaans then the use of the Dutch or Afrikaans word for the rhino should have appeared earlier. He enlisted teachers of Afrikaans and old Dutch to help search for any use of words such as wijd, wijdlip, wijdmond or wijdbek together with neushoorn/rhinoceros/renoster. No such usage was found and Rookmaaker concluded that van den Bergh’s explanation or any derivation from Dutch or Afrikaans was wrong. A meme though takes some stopping.
He continued:
Another option could be that the epithet white is a translation or derivation from one of the original languages spoken in the African interior. The chief interviewed by Barrow [1801], the hunters reporting to Truter and Somerville [1802], and the Griquas accompanying Bain [1849] probably used the word white for the rhinoceros in accordance with the usage in their own vernacular speech. Preliminary investigations, however, have not yielded any clues that would strengthen this argument.
Whatever the explanation for the name given to distinguish the White from the other rhinoceros of Africa, the corollary to the question of why the White Rhino is called that when it is not white must be: why is the Black Rhino called that when it is not black?
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| You can identify this rhino from the prehensile upper lip evident in the photograph. It is a Black Rhinoceros, photographed in Kenya's Masai Mara in 1991 |
Rookmaaker K. 2003. Why the name of the White Rhinoceros is not appropriate. Pachyderm no 34 (January-June 2003) 88-93.
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