Pygmy elephant of Spanish Guinea was "incarnation of the devil"

The translation from Spanish of the 1962 report of a "pygmy elephant" in "Spanish Guinea" (now Equatorial Guinea) is in. My translator felt that it had been badly translated into Spanish from another language - at a guess, I would say French.

The report, from La vida animal en la Guinea Española (Aurelio Basilio, Instituto de Estudios Africanos, Madrid, 1962) says the pygmy elephant of Spanish Guinea was known by the "natives" as Esemasas, in order to distinguish it from the common one [common elephant], Nsok." Like alleged pygmy elephants from other parts of West Africa, "They consider the 'pygmy elephant' more fierce and scary than the larger ones; and this is why it is so difficult to kill them, and this has led them to see the 'pygmy elephant' as an incarnation of the devil, and they think that when a Esamasas sees a hunter pointing at him with a lethal weapon, it suddenly leaves its elephant shape and transforms into a human."

Elefante enano in "Spanish Guinea"

The Spanish colony of Rio Muni in West Africa only came Spain's way as compensation for a territorial swap with the Portuguese in Latin America in 1810, and the Spanish were never that enthusiastic about the little territory, squashed up on the coast between French Gabon to the south and German (later French and British) Cameroon to the North. Serious efforts by the Spanish to develop the colony only started in the 1930s.

It only formally became "Spanish Guinea" in 1958, in a merger with the much less neglected coffee and cocoa-growing island colony of Ferdinando Poo just off the coast. Unimpressive though Spain's little African empire was, it was just big enough to contain - allegedly - a pygmy elephant.

The elefante enano (pygmy elephant) of what's now Equatorial Guinea was shot by a Spanish army captain in the 1950s, at a time when the colony was being formally prepared for independence. It was in the commune of Nsok, right on the border with Gabon.

It was written up in La Vida Animal in La Guinea Espanol, published in 1962 (front cover shown here), in a report of nearly two whole pages (longer than most reports of pygmy elephant shootings or sightings). I'm in the process of getting it translated and trying to track down and write to its publishers, the now probably defunct Instituto del Estudios Africanos in Madrid, with a view to reproducing Mr. H. Garcia's photo of Captain Chacorro posing next to the weird-looking smooth-skinned six-footer elephant he's just brought down.