Riding High: Horses, Humans and History in South Africa
Riding High: Horses, Humans and History in South Africa
SANDRA SWART
Riding High
Riding High
Horses, Humans and
History in South Africa
Sandra Swart
Published in South Africa by:
ISBN 978-1-86814-514-0
Wits University Press has made every reasonable effort to locate, contact and
acknowledge copyright owners. Please notify us should copyright not have been
properly identified and acknowledged. Any corrections will be incorporated in
subsequent editions of the book.
Endnotes221
Bibliography300
Index333
v
Acknowledgements
vi
Preface
T oni Morrison once observed: ‘If there’s a book you really want to read
but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.’ This is what I have
set out to do in filling the historiographical lacuna in the literature on horses,
and indeed the role of animals and the environment more generally, in the
history of southern Africa. Horses act as a way into understanding social and
political processes, as part of what has been termed the ‘animal turn’ in the
social sciences. Recent historiography is beginning to explore the importance
of animals in human affairs and has found that they have their own histories
both independently of and profoundly revealing of human history. My principal
research interest lies simply in the effects of an inter-species relationship
between a particularly well-evolved primate (Homo sapiens) and an evolving
odd-toed ungulate of the family Equidae (Equus caballus). In this book, I
explore the ramifications of this relationship for both species and its significance
in effecting change within their social and natural environments.
Adventures in fieldwork
Any research project that requires intense archival and field research faces
constraints imposed on one’s time – not by teaching, which is a pleasure, but
by the continual hunt for funding and endless administrative duties of today’s
university. The shell-shocked state of academia is reminiscent of Marshall Foch’s
defiant summation at the Battle of the Marne: ‘Hard pressed on my right. My
centre is yielding. Impossible to manoeuvre. Situation excellent. I shall attack.’
In much the same spirit, I embarked on this project.
So, to the surprise of my colleagues and the anxiety of my friends, I set
off to pursue the stories about horses in southern Africa. I went from the
more sedate state archives of Maseru, Cape Town, Bloemfontein, Durban,
Pretoria and London to the saddler and hackney communities of the Western
Cape, to the race track, to the Boerperde of the Eastern Cape and Free State,
to the Nooitgedacht enthusiasts of the north, to the mountain villages of the
Highlands of Lesotho. One theme generated by far the greatest quantity of
paper (the diet on which historians, like Coleoptera, feed) – the racing industry.
vii
Riding High
However, this is discussed here only as it pertains to the broader societal role of
horses, as even a cursory examination of the paperwork would cause it to loom
disproportionately large compared to its actual impact.1
My methodology includes the use of oral history, with research trips to
a variety of places in South Africa and Lesotho, often pursuing fieldwork on
horseback in otherwise inaccessible areas. Unlike some other historians (like
Robin Law, for example, who wrote the history of the horse in West Africa, but
was at pains to point out that he ‘did not undertake this project because [he
was] an enthusiast for horses’ and had ‘in fact, no special affections for these
animals’),2 I have an unabashed fondness for these creatures. But I approach
this project first and foremost as an historian, with my affection following, like
a dog, at my heels.
viii
Preface
through the chapters and the hunger to understand it. This is because history is
not so much a discipline as a pathology. It engenders obsession. This work grew
into my passion, filling several years of my life. And with passion comes pain.
I have been bored, lonely or terrified as often as I have been happy while doing
my fieldwork. This brings me to the everyday dangers of fieldwork. For years
there has been a poster on my door:
FIELDWORKER WANTED
To accompany environmental historian working
on horses in eastern Free State and Lesotho.
The pay is low, the area fairly dangerous,
the hours long and the work physically challenging.
A week- to two-week-long periods at a time –
usually during university holidays.
ix
Riding High
x
Preface
xi
Riding High
avoidance found in several closely linked social groups! I burst out breathlessly:
‘Is it because white horses symbolise death?’ ‘No,’ he said gently ‘it is because
white hair is hard to get off your pants.’
Talking horse
Such disappointments abounded, but at least the sources were talking to me
– largely because we shared a certain understanding. I have found that many
people are able to get through life without knowing the definition of a horse.
For those that are not, the redoubtable Dr Johnson has provided the following:
‘horse: [Sx] a neighing quadruped used for draught, carriage, and warfare.’ This
definition is helpful, but perhaps a trifle insufficient. Each horse society has its
own idiosyncratic language that changes over time. For example, the Kazaks,
who are particular about these things, have 62 words for the varying shades of
dark brown horses alone.6 In English, the equestrian vocabulary has yielded a
wonderful miscellany of words. The diseases alone are magnificently named:
‘poll evil’, ‘farcy’, ‘sweeney’, ‘wind puff ’ and, my personal favourite (and the
pseudonym I adopt when writing outraged letters to the newspapers), ‘fistulous
withers’.
Such words create a jargon, a secret language that both includes and
excludes. Historically, this was evident in horse cultures as various as those, for
example, of the secret horseman societies of Ireland, the plains and pampas of
the Americas, the Mongolian steppes and the Lesotho Highlands. Horsemanship
was both a way of entrenching societal divides, as the discussion will show,
and, much more occasionally, a way of crossing divides.7 Similarly, knowledge
about horses can unite, but it can also divide. But my knowledge, limited as it
is, offered a way into understanding and opened up conversations that were
otherwise impossible for an outsider to participate in. (As ‘Banjo’ Paterson, the
Australian ‘bush poet’ and eyewitness to the South African War, remarked upon
meeting strangers: ‘So we talked about horses, that one unfailing topic … [that]
is a better passport than any letter of introduction.’)8
This was vital because, after a long age of suspicion, historians have begun
to use the technique of asking people things. We began to view oral interviewing
more benignly after 1945, and introduced techniques like building rapport,
asking open-ended questions, exercising scrupulous note taking and eliciting
memories through introducing photographs. Oral historians have written about
xii
Preface
xiii
Riding High
animals and human society and the impact that their relationship has had on
their environment.
Particular truths and legends have become entrenched in the various oral
traditions – Basotho, Afrikaans and so on. About two-and-a-half thousand years
ago, historians decided to try and tell the truth about the past.12 This endeavour
got off to a shaky start. The mythical tales people told to comfort, to affirm, to
correct and to police themselves were replaced with stuttering efforts towards
‘history’ as we understand it. Just as today, they were frequently partial, biased
and often just plain wrong. But they were part of a conversation that tried to tell
the ‘real stories’. This study attempts to extract the facts as far as possible and,
moreover, explain the process of myth making by contextualising it within the
material changes in society. Fact is no less beautiful than legend, but it is more
untidy, more difficult to gather, needs more funding to get hold of and is a lot
harder to explain. Moreover, it would be wrong to insist that this is the final
word: this book is just the start of a conversation. After all, as ‘Banjo’ Paterson
said about his own experiences in the South African War, ‘nobody believes
anything that a man says about a horse’.13
xiv
Chapter 1
shifting colonial frontiers, the dyad of ‘guns and horses’. Sometimes one hears
a distant whinny in travellers’ descriptions, in personal letters and in diaries.
Yet horses are everywhere in the primary sources. They were significant
within the colonial economies of southern Africa. They occupied material
and symbolic spaces, helping to buttress the shifting socio-political orders
and looming large in rituals of social differentiation. It is widely accepted that
horses played a significant role in human history (and, though less remarked,
that humans played a pivotal role in horses’ history). As Alfred Crosby has
noted of the broad global processes of human settler invasions of new lands,
human colonists came to the ‘new worlds’ not as individual immigrants, but ‘as
part of a grunting, lowing, neighing, crowing, chirping, snarling, buzzing, self-
replicating and world-altering avalanche’.3 Just as they had done in Europe, Asia,
the Americas and North Africa, in southern Africa the equine colonisers who
accompanied the human ones not only provided power and transportation, but
also altered their new biophysical and social environments in a range of ways.4
Although, as the chapters that follow will show, not as economically important
as cattle, not as ecologically damaging as sheep, and not as familiar as dogs and
cats in the domestic sphere, nevertheless the horse has played an inescapable
role. In their three-and-a-half centuries in southern Africa horses have in fact
managed to leave visible socio-political and economic tracks. Until the mid-
twentieth century they were integral to civic functioning and public recreation.
They were replaced by mechanised devices only after lively debate, staying
significant in the high-end leisure sector; subsistence agriculture; the low-cost
transport of goods in some urban locales and transport, e.g. in the Lesotho
Highlands; and in the South African military and policing sectors. Until the
present horses have remained elemental to certain public rituals of power, from
military parades to intensely personal acts of healing in riding for the disabled.
Since the late eighteenth century racehorses have remained a popular way for
people to correlate inversely their hopes and their wages every week.
2
‘But where’s the bloody horse?’
owned.5 His words now resonate without irony, because – drawing eclectically
on the fields of environmental history,6 literary criticism, psychology, cultural
geography, bioethics and anthropology – recent historiography is beginning to
give greater emphasis to the importance of animal-centred research. Animals
are roaming the groves of academe; they bark and paw at the doors of the ivory
tower.
Historians have begun to open these doors a trifle. No longer is the mention
of an animal-related topic likely to provoke ‘surprise and amusement’, as was
the case 20 years ago.7 Instead of being dismissed as simply a fad, the increasing
inclusion of animals is gaining momentum as part of our social and political
narratives, from the early movement of hunters and gatherers; through the
grand narrative of domestication and agricultural transformation; to figuring
allegorically and materially in religions, social rituals and literature.8 Animal
Studies is now a growing academic field. It has its own journals and is wide
ranging in disciplinary terms, extending from, for example, anthropologies of
human–animal interactions, animal geographies and the position of animals in
the construction of identity to animals in popular culture.9 Analysis is becoming
progressively more diverse, including rural and urban locales and literary,
cinematic and cyberspace arenas, and touching on themes like the commercial
food chain, ecotourism and the construction of national identities. Some of the
new historical scholarship on animals has been the work of historians (like Ritvo
and Thomas); some the work of literary and cultural studies practitioners (like
Fudge and Baker). Nevertheless, whether the ‘animal turn’ is manifested in eco-
criticism or environmental history, or featured in the interdisciplinary domain
of Animal Studies, it remains the case, as Ritvo has observed, that historical
research provides much of the bedrock for more exclusively interpretive
scholarship. To understand developments in the field to date, with particular
focus on the discipline of history, we need to ask not only ‘Why animals?’, but
also ‘Why now?’
❈ ❈ ❈
Historians, like artists, often fall in love with their models. Lately, however,
there has been a significant move away from old models towards embracing
new forms, and concomitant new sources, in history writing in southern
Africa. Certainly, the international green movement has effected change within
academe, with scholars focusing on the history of science, technology and the
3
Riding High
environment. Human practices now threaten animal worlds – indeed, the global
environment – to such an extent that humans have now both an ‘intellectual
responsibility’ and ‘ethical duty’ to consider animals closely.10 Additionally, the
twentieth century’s ethological observations of animals as closer to humans
than we have previously acknowledged leads towards a gradual rejection of
the nature/culture distinction that has been a central part of C.P. Snow’s ‘two
cultures’, the distinction between social and natural sciences.11
Other theorists have argued that animals were never part of the twentieth
century’s modernist project – except, arguably, as commodities – and now,
particularly coupled to the rise of the animal rights movement, increasing
attention is being paid to animal topics by postmodernist scholars and activists
(although these two groups are often at ideological odds).12 As Jacobs deftly
encapsulates it: ‘modernists display confidence in humans’ ability to control
nature, while postmodernists are convinced that humans construct it.’ (Of
course, they are not idealists in the manner of the redoubtable Bishop Berkeley;
they are not contending that nature has no reality outside human minds; rather,
that our capacity to understand the ‘nature’ of nature is limited by the nature
of the minds that do the understanding.) At their extremes, however, they
sometimes obscure the view that natural or biophysical forces act on human
history.13
Internationally, processes are at work that challenge received wisdom –
secularisation, urbanisation, diminishing family bonds, the refashioning of
societies through globalisation, migrations – all precipitating a reconsideration
of existing mental hierarchies and certainties. Some experience these changes
as increasing alienation; some search space for aliens and anthropomorphise
earth’s animals to find echoes of our own humanity in a time of disaffection
and social dislocation. Perhaps humans simply do not want to be alone in the
cosmos.
Quite aside from human loneliness is the issue of the manner in which
humans may be joined by other creatures within the axis of scholarly scrutiny.
Some scholars contend that animals themselves cannot be discussed, only
their representations.14 Others concur: Chamberlin notes that ‘“[h]orse” is not
a horse. It is the word for horse’.15 Another contention is that what humans
think they have learnt about animals remains simply a reflection of their own
cultural preoccupations; thus, for example, Jane Goodall’s ‘discoveries are as
much about humans as about chimpanzees’.16 Some histories of animals thus
4
‘But where’s the bloody horse?’
5
Riding High
Phineas’s parody of the kind of social history associated with E.P. Thompson,
noted earlier – social history is well able to deal with both the material role
of horses and their symbolic uses. Indeed, social history recognises the
importance of exploring the linkages between both ideological and economic
aspects of human–animal relationships.22 Masters of social history, like Eugene
Genovese, Eric Hobsbawm, Keith Thomas, Thompson and Charles van Onselen,
customarily manage both discourse and ideology as equally integral to their
study as material conditions, without needing to ‘shift paradigms’. Writing in the
early 1990s, both Hobsbawm and Thompson, for example, explicitly singled out
the environment as a significant issue.23 From the outset, environmental history
has been influenced by a radical approach forged by social history, i.e. the idea
of exploring history ‘from below’, although the concluding chapter will discuss
the snaffle and curbs placed on such an approach.
While animals are generally still looked at by scholars in the humanities and
social sciences with the goal of achieving a better understanding of humans,
some have moved away from narrowly anthropocentric approaches of the
past that depicted animals as passive objects of human agency. Preceding
studies allowed little room for the agency of animals (or, indeed, some groups
of humans, like women and the working class, for example), and this will be
explored in the closing chapter.24
6
‘But where’s the bloody horse?’
are limitations. They have both deployed particularity over generality, using
case studies to examine larger issues. Both have faith in the possible political
relevance of their work.25
The socio-environmental approach thus highlights new aspects of power,
its sources and the motives behind its mobilisation. As Jacobs notes with wry
irony, as both social and environmental historians claim to write ‘from below’,
it is odd that they have not encountered each other more frequently.26 While
infrequent, their encounters have been significant. In 1972 Roderick Nash, an
eminent pioneer in the field, commented: ‘In a real sense environmental history
fitted into the framework of New Left history. This would indeed be history
“from the bottom up”, except that here the exploited element would be the biota
and the land itself.’27 For social historians, ‘the exploited element’ is the human
oppressed, those trampled underfoot, such as blacks, women, peasants and
labourers. For environmental historians, it is that which is literally trampled
underfoot: the small organisms, the soil, water and biophysical surroundings.
Both approaches have sought not only examples of oppression, but agency,
exercised by the ecological and social communities.
Animals can thus be seen as the latest beneficiaries of a ‘democratising
tendency’ specifically within historical studies.28 Some ethnographies now depict
animals not merely as a vehicle with which to explore a particular human social
facet. Anthropology thus offers a good model for other disciplines and historical
writing has drawn on these perspectives. Nearly a half century ago Levi-Strauss
urged anthropologists to acknowledge the ways in which animals afford humans
an important conceptual resource (animals, he argued, are ‘bonnes à penser’,
things with which to think), while more materialist anthropology considered
how animals serve as sources and products of power and inequality (so they are
good not just to think ‘with’ but also ‘about’).29
More specifically to South Africa, the seductive but dangerous simplicity
of environmental determinism in earlier works, as Beinart has observed,
conceivably rendered later historians uncomfortable with incorporating
environmental issues into explanations of human change.30 This was exacerbated
by disciplinary insularity and a lack of familiarity with ‘science’.31 Also, as Steyn
and Wessels suggest, the increasing political isolation of South Africa meant
that the impact of the international environmental revolution was minimised
locally.32 Apartheid was the enemy that animated the vigorous radical or social
history school, and many of the most capable historians focused their research
7
Riding High
8
‘But where’s the bloody horse?’
social sciences, however, and within the historical guild in particular, are still
very few. Most recent international scholarship is still almost entirely Western,
Eurocentric or neo-Eurocentric – about animals in Europe or in its settler
societies in North America and Australia, for example. Exceptions with regard
to the developing world include work on the camel in Islamic society; a study
of tigers in the Malay world; and of horses in the Indian Ocean world.39 In the
southern African context, wildlife has received a great deal of historiographic
attention, following MacKenzie’s analysis of British imperialism and its
hunting network and, specific to South Africa, Carruthers’ intervention, which
corrected public myths on wildlife protection.40 Animal pests and diseases have
received perhaps the most historiographic attention.41 Colonial science (in
this case, specifically ideas about animal management) operated in interaction
with a ‘vernacular science’ – a hybrid of indigenous African, local settler and
metropolitan knowledge systems, as Beinart and Musselman suggest.42 There has
been some scrutiny of historical ecological changes, particularly in Van Sittert’s
and Beinart’s work, and human–nature relations in literary texts.43 Historians
have shown that just as they had done in other parts of the world, animal and
plant ‘colonisers’ transformed their new habitats – both biophysical and social
– in various ways.44 Jacobs, for example, has offered a brilliant societal analysis
(or an exposé of the politics of ‘class and grass’) through the lens of the ‘Great
Donkey Massacre’ of the 1980s in Bophuthatswana, discussed in greater depth
in Chapter 8. In the broader continental context, horses have been discussed by
Robin Law, who wrote a pioneering study of horses in West Africa;45 by Fisher
on horses in the Sudan;46 by Jim Webb in a skilful analysis of the equine role in
western Sahara and Senegambia;47 and Legassick on horses and firearms in the
Samorian army of the late nineteenth century.48 Research that uses animals as
a window into understanding human society has, for example, been developed
by research into wildlife and on domesticated creatures of southern Africa,
including some pony tales.49
9
Riding High
10
‘But where’s the bloody horse?’
11
Riding High
Paleolithic cave paintings.56 Domestication was not solely a biological, but also
a cultural process that affected both the human domesticator and the animal
domesticate. Horses had the traits, limited to only a few animals, to make them
domesticable in the first place.57 They were large enough to be useful, but small
enough to be manageable. Most importantly, they were herd animals, sociable
and used to living within a hierarchy that translated easily into a new hierarchy
under human custodianship. They could breed in captivity and were neither too
panicky nor too aggressive when confronted by humans. Thus, the intersection
of natural history and human history provided a favourable environment for
domestication.
In order to be domesticated, animals had to be incorporated into the social
structure of a human community and become objects of ownership, purchase
and barter. This was the basis of the Neolithic revolution, when a fundamental
change in human societies occurred and groups of hunter-gatherers became
farmers and pastoralists. There was probably a succession first from generalised
hunting in the Palaeolithic period at the end of the last Ice Age to specialised
hunting and following herds. This was followed by taking ownership of a
herd, then controlled breeding and ultimately human selection for favoured
characteristics.
Artefacts unambiguously associated with riding or traction date to the start
of the second millennium BCE.58 Evidence from mitochondrial DNA studies
suggests that the domestication of horses occurred in multiple locations and at
various times, in eastern Europe and the south-west Russian steppes in Central
Asia; in western Europe; in Iberia; and in North Africa.59 Widespread utilisation
occurred principally through the transfer of technology for capturing, taming
and rearing free-born horses caught in the wild. Accordingly, the transmission
of technology (rather than the selective breeding of horses) may have been the
key leading to their wide-ranging use.60 It was, therefore, probably not herds of
domesticated horses that spread over the expanse of the Old World, but rather
the knowledge that made their domestication possible, and this was slow to be
disseminated. Arguably, the expansion of ur-horsemanship was restricted by
an elite because this technology contained the secret of a new kind of power.
Newly created equestrian classes and communities had access to entirely
new ways of life predicated on this novel access to dominance, commanding
both fresh access to resources and a new mindset. Horses certainly transformed
warfare, initially in the steppes north of the Black Sea.61 By the middle of the
12
‘But where’s the bloody horse?’
second millennium BCE, horses were used to pull chariots – in Greece, Egypt
and Mesopotamia, and in China by the fourteenth century BCE.62 The horse
allowed travel overland from the Atlantic to the Pacific coastlines, facilitating
connections between centres of civilisation.63 Mobility offered a new dimension
of power: a human who could defeat distance could also defeat other humans.
The first ‘horse whisperer’ or noted equestrian expert, Xenophon, himself
commented on the conjunction of martial heroism, horsemanship and social
privilege in the fourth century BCE. This historical dynamic was observed by
Aristotle, who contended that cavalry states tended to be oligarchies, because
horses were necessarily restricted to a wealthy minority.64 An individual on
horseback was seldom a slave; indeed, there appears to be a correlation between
horse owning and human owning.
Horses have themselves changed because of the relationship they have had
with humans. They have changed as a species in shape, size, variety, geographic
distribution and demographics. As a consequence of their mutualism with
humans, the geographic range of horses altered entirely: their northern and
southern limits were transfigured. Ultimately, there was no area entirely off
limits to equine colonisation. (Shackleton even managed to take Siberian ponies
to the Antarctic.) In the southern African context, as the subsequent chapters
will explore, the equine interlopers of the region were not only instruments of
change, but in transforming the human socio-political and mental landscapes,
the horse itself was transformed.
Animal history offers a way to cross literal and figurative borders. 65
Methodologically, horses are good for crossing boundaries. That their range
(and therefore their study) is not limited by national borders helps break the
constraints of area studies, particularly those bounded by the national historical
imagination. Animals, and indeed ‘nature’ itself, are difficult to contain
within the boundaries of the nation state (although states tried to do so and
cross-border traffic, legal and illegal, generated a mountain of useful paperwork
for historians). Environmental, ecological and biological processes work on
transregional, transcontinental and global scales, defying, as environmental
historians Donald Worster and Alfred Crosby note, ‘a narrow view of political
boundaries and nationality’.66 Environmental history can thus offer a very
useful tactic for escaping over-reliance on the nation state paradigm. In this
way, horses can help us reach the synovial histories in the fluid spaces between
the bones of the nation state.
13
Riding High
This study tries to expand the geographical scope by including the former
Basutoland, now Lesotho. The horses of empire are bound together, connected
by blood, history and styles of horsemanship. South-east Asia and southern
Africa are linked together by a common equine heritage. As the following three
chapters will show, the horse of the Dutch empire in South-east Asia – the
Sumbawan, ‘Javanese’ or ‘oriental’ stock – underwent a partial exodus to the
Cape; the stock then spread into Basutoland; and horses from both Basutoland
and the Cape were relocated to Australia and India within the imperial network,
before receiving a massive infusion of genes from Russia, North and South
America, England, Ireland, Hungary, even Burma, and also – ironically – from
India and Australia.67
Global corporations and the nation state, in its control of horses in times
of peace and war, were major consumers and producers of horseflesh. War and
trade are great diffusers of genotypes. Imperial and, later, colonial concerns also
had unintended effects on trends in demography and disease – both animal
and human. They influenced the way in which people conceived of elements of
nature, such as horses. Equids were pivotal in the economies and societies of the
nineteenth-century Indian Ocean and South China Sea, crucial in war, trade,
transport and leisure. Of course, horses, like guns and other imports, were not
transferred seamlessly to the periphery from the core or from other nodes in
the network.68 The local contexts had an impact on the technology itself, as the
chapters that follow will show.69
As Chapter 2, ‘The Reins of Power’, explains, the equine flotsam of empire
was marooned in a hostile Africa of disease, scant forage, poisonous plants and
dangerous predators – both animal and human. Yet they helped their fellow
(human) invaders survive and take control, playing a central role in socio-
political processes in the early settlement of the Cape and the interior.
In southern Africa, the Americas and South-east Asia, colonists created
new breeds of horses to suit their needs, both deliberately and inadvertently.70
These horses could differ markedly from those of the metropole, and after
a while could come to be identified with the particular colonial culture,
facilitating differentiation from the metropole. After independence, horses
were often one of the symbols utilised in the development of national pride
and self-definition.71 Chapter 3, ‘Blood Horses’, offers a broad chronological
investigation into changing ideas of ‘blood’ and ‘breed purity’ in horse breeding
in the Cape from the introduction of horses in the mid-seventeenth century
14
‘But where’s the bloody horse?’
to the beginning of the twentieth century. The initial Dutch settler horse stock
was set up with ponies from Sumbawa, and other working breeds were fused
by the eighteenth century to form the hardy, utilitarian ‘Cape Horse’, which was
exported to other parts of the global imperial network. The introduction of
horse racing to southern Africa wrenched the breeding industry in a different
direction, fostering the spread of English Thoroughbreds bred solely for speed
and pedigree. The nineteenth-century wars of conquest and human migrations
required the utilitarian Cape Horse, but the quality of these sturdy little horses
was perceived to decline and various attempts were made to ‘save’ the breed.
Breeding thus set up a fresh suite of debates in both state and popular arenas
about the relationship between nurture and nature, ideas that both drew on and
were then applied to notions surrounding race, class and gender.
However, attempts by settlers to cling to control of equine power were
doomed. Horses were not a technology that could remain in the hands of just
one community. Chapter 4, ‘The Empire Rides Back’, demonstrates how one
indigenous group, under Moshoeshoe, came to wrest the technology free from
the original group’s grasp. Southern Sotho people scattered by the lifaqane were
consolidated by Moshoeshoe within the territory that came to be known as
Basutoland/Lesotho. From the time the Basotho first acquired horses from the
1830s, they deployed them variously in the processes of state building.
A major impetus towards mixing breeds and globalising phenotype came
at the cusp of the twentieth century. Nothing globalises like an imperial war.
In Chapter 5, ‘The last of the old campaigners’, the role of horses in the South
African War (1899–1902) is considered. Aside from the human cost, the
conflict exacted a heavy environmental toll, with massive animal mortality
figures. The casualties suffered by these animals were on an enormous scale,
contemporaneously understood as a form of ‘holocaust’. The chapter analyses
the reasons for such fatalities before discussing the human experience of equine
mortality, in particular the civic memorialisation of the carnage and how
combatants on both sides came to understand this intimate loss.
The immediate aftermath of this devastating war is discussed in Chapter 6:
‘The Cinderella of the Livestock Industry’, which begins with the devastated
post-South African War rural economy and surveys the rise of the horse
industry from the beginning of the twentieth century, when it seemed as if the
horse era would last forever, to the 1940s, when its imminent end was palpable.
The horse industry had to recreate itself to survive. Thus, Chapter 7,
15
Riding High
‘High Horses’, examines what happened to the horse trade after it began to cater
to the high-end leisure market by focusing on an aspect of the growth of an
Afrikaner bourgeoisie in the platteland through one of the ‘things’ they desired:
a particular kind of horse. It explores the introduction of the exotic American
Saddlebred horse from the United States to the agrarian sectors of the then Cape
Province, Orange Free State and Transvaal, centred initially in the rural Karoo.
The chapter analyses the elite – and, to an extent, internationalist – rhetorical
space that these ‘American’ imports inhabited, by contrasting it with the self-
consciously egalitarian and ethnically unifying discourse surrounding another
horse used primarily by Afrikaans speakers, the Boerperd. The comparison
between the supporters of American Saddlers and Boerperde, both factions
within Afrikaans-speaking society, and an analysis of their quite different
discourses reflect two ways of conceptualising identity, especially in the way
they mobilised consumer hunger.
Thus, like the colonisers themselves, the equine ‘invaders’ were the
instruments of extensive and long-term changes within both natural and
social landscapes. The imperial exchange meant a reciprocal transformation.
In abetting some humans in affecting change, the horse itself underwent a
morphological transformation and its function within human society also
altered significantly over time.
With the globalising spread of horses, the very sensory fabric of human
life altered. The final chapter, ‘The World the Horses Made’, assesses the horse’s
impact on the human world of southern Africa from the mid-seventeenth
century through an examination of the visceral – a way of offering a history
that includes noise and smells. Secondly, the chapter debates the idea of
historical agency of horses in human history. A debate is emerging over the
issue of animal agency in historical processes, dealt with in Chapter 8, which
explores the possibility of an animal-centred history. This is a tentative attempt
to acknowledge the corporeality of animals and to argue that they have
potentially their own history, entangled in that of humans to be sure, but their
own nevertheless – as individuals, with memories and intentions and desires.72
16
‘But where’s the bloody horse?’
have yielded a wealth of historical detail and oral history opens up and probes
the narratives of memory. Interviewing eyewitnesses to reconstruct past
events is combined with recording popular history remembered in anecdote,
poem, proverb and song. We have already discussed changes within socio-
environmental history that might permit a transformed understanding of the
horse as historical actor. Irrespective of whether one accepts a measure of equine
agency in the horse’s historical role, it is still possible to engage with the horse as
a flesh-and-blood object. The textual understanding generated by analysing the
discourse around them (their owners, the archives, magazines, poetry, songs,
stories and myths) is coupled with the physicality of fieldwork (touching horses,
watching them move, watching them being ridden, watching them eat and,
of course, watching them defecate). Almost two decades ago, the pioneering
environmental historian, Donald Worster, called for environmental historians
to get mud on their shoes.73 In my line of work, you step in a lot more than that.
17