Riding High: horses, humans and history in South Africa, by Sandra Swart. Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2010. xiv + 344 pp. ISBN 978-1-86814-514-0. £26.95.

Abstract

Riding High: horses, humans and history in South Africa, by Sandra Swart. Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2010. xiv + 344 pp. ISBN 978-1-86814514-0. £26.95. In the opening chapter of this engaging and impeccably researched book, Sandra Swart asserts that "there is a strange concealment when historians write about the past", with the absence of the obvious from their accounts. Horses, she says "have been too ubiquitous ... to catch the historian's eye", and this study is an attempt to redress the balance through chronicling the effects of the relationship between horses and humans in South Africa from the time when the 17th century Dutch introduced the horse to the Cape through to the present day. It should be said at the outset that this is not a wholly comprehensive history of every aspect of South African equine history, but rather a collection of themed essays, some of which have been published in earlier incarnations in a wide variety of scholarly journals ranging from the Journal of Southern African Studies to Animals & Society. For this book these have been re-written and expanded, and hopefully they will now reach a wider audience by being brought together and presented as a consecutive narrative, for this is very much a case of the whole being much more than the sum of the parts. Some of the chapter headings - "The Reins of Power: Equine Ecological Imperialism in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries", "The Empire Rides Back: An African Response to the Horse in Southern Africa", " "The Cinderella of the livestock industry': The Changing Role of Horses in the First Half of the Twentieth Century" - give a flavour of the themes that are explored. Space precludes examining all of these in detail, so, by way of example, let me focus on her account of horses in the Anglo-Boer War of 1899-1902, headed "The last of the old campaigners". It is well-known that the British scoured the world for the huge number of horses they needed for the cavalry, mounted infantry, artillery and supply trains needed to prosecute the war, and that many of the horses they secured proved wholly unsuitable. Swart tells us that casualties on the British side amounted to 326,073 horses and 51,399 mules, a rate of 66.88% and 35.37% of the total head count respectively, leading one contemporary to describe this as a "holocaust". The story of their experiences during the war is harrowing indeed, and reminds one irresistibly of scenes in the National Theatre's stunning production of Michael Morpurgo's War Horse (set in a later war I know, but the parallels are strikingly close). But Swart takes the story further and looks at how the relationship between humans and horses developed and changed during the war. Shared hardships led to a greater dependency on each other and a greater intimacy, perhaps even a greater degree of sentimentality about the relationship, which could even be mobilised as propaganda when the enemy supposedly demonstrated a more callous attitude towards the horse; and it is no surprise to learn that, both in Britain and South Africa, this was the first war to be followed by the erection of memorials to ordinary horses that had taken part (as opposed to chargers of famous commanders such as Wellington or Napoleon such as had been commemorated in earlier times). Some of the survivors too were treated as heroes; I recently came across the story of 'Freddie', the one and only horse of the 2nd Life Guards to return to England, who received, at the express command of Queen Alexandra, the same Boer War campaign medal as the men who had fought in South Africa. But there was also a darker side to the relationship. As food shortages grew during the sieges of Mafeking and Kimberley, horses began to be slaughtered for food. As Swart says, at a time of greater intimacy between humans and horses, this was "a shocking act, tantamount almost to cannibalism", and she quotes a resident of Kimberley saying that "it took some pushing down". …