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The part in the and humans hippos and humans section about Zulu perception of hippos was rather dubious. The sources are South African scouting websites which quote or summarize biographies of Baden-Powell which relate an anecdote told by Baden-Powell himself in which someone else explained the meaning of a chant to him. The source for the first statement ("... preferred to be as brave as a hippo, since even lions were not considered to match its courage") doesn't actually say so. The second statement is backed up by the cited source but is unfortunately at least partly wrong, possibly because Baden-Powell misremembered the chant or because the person translating it for him added embellishments to the translation. I don't speak Zulu, but it took just a little fiddling with Google Translate to confirm what's obvious: There's no "better than" in that Zulu text, beyond it using a, shall we say, less than official spelling of Zulu. What did the Zulus actually chant? That's anybody's guess.
Maybe there are indeed scholarly works that discuss the perception of the hippo in Zulu culture; then we should summarize what those works say. This amounted to rumor-mongering and Chinese whispers. Thus I'll drastically shorten it and attribute it to Baden-Powell. Huon (talk) 23:20, 20 September 2021 (UTC)
