In November 1928, a young hippopotamus climbed out of the St Lucia estuary in Zululand and started walking south. She did not stop for three years. By the time she was done, Huberta had covered roughly 1 600 kilometres, and become the most famous animal in South Africa.

Nobody knows what caused this. Huberta simply left her pod one night and struck out alone, ambling through sugarcane fields, township backyards, and coastal towns as she went. She swam rivers, grazed golf courses, and once wandered into the middle of Durban, stopping traffic outside a garage on the Umgeni Road. Newspapers picked up her trail almost immediately and followed her across the country. Readers wanted updates on where she’d been spotted the way they now want sports scores or celebrity news.

The country fell in love. Farmers, who by rights should have shot a hippo trampling their crops, instead left her alone, charmed by the novelty. The Natal Provincial Administration went further: in 1931, it passed a proclamation declaring Huberta royal game, making her the only wild animal in South African history protected by a law written for her specifically. She had, by then, been sighted by an estimated quarter of a million people. Nobody was entirely sure why a wandering hippo had captured the public imagination so completely. She just had.

The name came later and almost as an afterthought: newspapers guessed her sex wrong at first and called her “Hubert”, then corrected course once it became clear she wasn’t male, without bothering to rename her much. Huberta stuck.

Her luck ran out on the Keiskamma River, just short of King William’s Town, in April 1931. A group of hunters, apparently unaware of or indifferent to her legal protection, shot her. The killing caused a genuine public outcry: the men were fined, and Huberta’s death was treated like a national bereavement. She was given the kind of send-off usually reserved for people: her body was preserved by taxidermists and put on permanent display, first travelling the country, and eventually settling at what is now the Amathole Museum in kuGompo City (formerly East London), where she remains today, nearly a century later.