Riding High

Horses, Humans and History in South Africa

Sandra Swart

• Publisher: Wits University Press
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781868148547
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Zoology
• Index: Biological Sciences

Horses were key to the colonial economies of southern Africa, buttressing the socio-political order and inspiring contemporary imaginations. Just as they had done in Europe, Asia, the Americas and North Africa, these equine colonizers not only provided power and transportation to settlers (and later indigenous peoples) but also helped transform their new biophysical and social environments.The horses introduced to the southern tip of Africa were not only agents but subjects of enduring changes. This book explores the introduction of these horses under VOC rule in the mid-seventeenth century, their dissemination into the interior, their acquisition by indigenous groups and their ever-shifting roles. In undergoing their relocation to the Cape, the horse of the Dutch empire in southeast Asia experienced a physical transformation over time. Establishing an early breeding stock was fraught with difficulty and horses remained vulnerable in the new and dangerous environment. They had to be nurtured into defending their owners' ambitions: first those of the white settlement and then African and other hybrid social groupings. The book traces the way horses were adapted by shifting human needs in the nineteenth century. It focuses on their experiences in the South African War, on the cusp of the twentieth century, and highlights how horses remained integral to civic functioning on various levels, replaced with mechanization only after lively debate.The book thus reinserts the horse into the broader historical narrative. The socio-economic and political ramifications of their introduction is delineated. The idea of ecological imperialism is tested in order to draw southern African environmental history into a wider global dialogue on socio-environmental historiographical issues. The focus is also on the symbolic dimension that led horses to be both feared and desired. Even the sensory dimensions of this species' interaction with human societies is explored.

Chapter 1

‘But where’s the bloody horse?’

Humans, Horses and Historiography

You praise the firm restraint with which they write –

I’m with you there, of course:

They use the snaffle and the curb all right,

But where’s the bloody horse?

Roy Campbell (1901–57), ‘On some South African novelists’

IN THE DUNES outside the Namibian town of Swakopmund on the south-west Atlantic coast there is a mass grave of horses dating back almost a century. Strong winds blow the desert sands, exposing and then concealing the weathered bones from time to time. Each skull has a bullet hole in the forehead. These are the remains of over 2,000 horses and mules destroyed in the summer of 1915 to halt the epidemic spread of virulent glanders among South African Defence Force animals.¹ Like the shifting desert sands, the historical record reveals and conceals the history of horses in southern Africa.

There is a strange concealment when historians write about the past.² It is the absence – perhaps forgivable – of the obvious. Horses have been too ubiquitous, in a way, to catch the historian’s eye. Perhaps it is the very centrality of animals to human lives that has previously rendered them invisible – at least invisible to scholars intent on mainstream history or the (aptly labelled) humanities more generally. Horses are absent from the official historical record in southern Africa, except when one detects their hoofprints in some battle, finds an allusion to the gallant exploits of a particular horse or the tragic slaughter of horses in war, or reads of them amalgamated in a much desired commodity on the 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.

The ‘animal turn’

A generation ago, in order to caricature the new social history, a historian wrote a satirical essay (under the pseudonym Charles Phineas) on ‘Household pets and urban alienation’ in which he declared that the history of pets remained too much the history of their owners, illuminating more about the owning than the 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 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 have adopted a more poststructural, ‘textual’ or ‘linguistic’ approach to their subjects on the grounds that such histories are necessarily representational, composed of past documents written by humans about animals, which are then doubly reinterpreted by humans.¹⁷ When writing about animals, for example, Berger contends that he speaks of nothing more real than human imaginings,¹⁸ and Baker and others have contended that animals themselves cannot be scrutinised, only their depictions.¹⁹ Thus the ‘curb’ and ‘snaffle’ (as Campbell puts it) of critical discourse analysis is much in evidence, but the physical animal is missing.

Certainly, historians can benefit from the close reading technique of literary critics, and the emphasis on the genealogy and ambiguity of language. Close reading reminds historians that elements of concern about ‘wild animals’ or ‘feral’ animals or ‘pets’ or ‘sacred animals’ or ‘dangerous animals’ are a product of language and rhetoric. These categories are debatable and contextual, but they are certainly constructed with words.²⁰ Historical approaches to animals reveal the contextual specificity of any particular human–animal relationship and how categories, including those of ‘human’ and ‘animal’, are neither inevitable nor universal, but are forged in particular contexts by actors with often conflicting interests.

Of course, symbolic or rhetorical uses of the animal should indubitably receive the same critical attention from a historian as the real beast. That said, social history is perfectly able to contain ideology and materiality, textual discourse, and corporeality without recourse to postmodernist theory, as the final chapter will explore. Indeed, ironically (given the contention by Rothfels and Berger), it may well have been in reaction to the extreme rarefaction of the ‘textual turn’ within the discipline of history that made some (other) historians yearn for the possibilities of solid corporeality offered by the ‘animal turn’. In this view, ‘nature’, and animals in particular, have a tangibility lacking in ‘literary theory’. Animals cannot be just another cultural construction, because they have literal viscerality. They undeniably exist in a way that sits uneasily with postmodern insistence on textual primacy and, as Dr Johnson once did, we can use them to say ‘I refute it thus’.²¹

Horses could reasonably have received Johnson’s boot (although, unlike the stone, they might have kicked back). Horses are breathing beasts; they exist and live historical lives and impact on their own world and on the world of humans socio-politically and economically. Ironically – considering the pseudonymous 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

Horses and hyphenated historians

Environmental history (which includes the historical side of Animal Studies) and the new social history emerged in chorus as definable fields of study. To some extent, both academic projects stemmed from socio-political movements gathering impetus during the 1960s and 1970s: reacting respectively to the concerns of the ecology/animal rights lobby and the civil rights/feminist campaigns. They share fertile grounds for cross-pollination. The ‘grassroots movement’ could be quite literal: both learnt from the Annales school in calling for the grand bio-geographical context and both exhibit an Annaliste-inspired ambition to explore a totalising history. They espouse the creative use of source materials to tackle the previously neglected, particularly ordinary people over elites and everyday life over sensational events. They can both evoke the human face, as opposed to the aridities of statecraft and administrative development. Research in both fields can reflect a new scholarly egalitarianism, although there 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...