Chance cross-cultural unicorn concepts lost in translation
native god’ or ‘something natives worshipped’, these brief, naïve references to local beliefs are likely to indicate, albeit in indigenous idioms which did not survive translation into English, the significance and prominence of the creature in local thought. More is needed, however, to say something about that significance.
Baines was a more sceptical writer. He had searched for rock paintings of unicorns on farms in the Eastern Cape; hearsay was not enough: ‘The rumours among Hottentots and other tribes bordering on the colony are easily recognised as our own legends of the unicorn, the mermaid, &c., returned to us altered, and perhaps improved, by travel’ .
Other early documentary sources report more specific indigenous beliefs. In 1800, the missionary Johannes Theodorus van der Kemp recorded two remarkable sets: one concerning a striped horse-like animal of incredible swiftness known to some Khoekhoen; and one concerning a one-horned creature known to an Nguni group. These descriptions allow us to distinguish two conflated forms: one characterized above all by its single horn and the other by its stripes and resembling a zebra or quagga.
It was never caught nor shot, as it is by its swiftness unapproachable; it has the form of a horse, and is streaked, but finer than the dau
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