Horses were central in South African society from their introduction into the regional environment as an alien species by the Dutch East Indian Company in 1652, until mechanisation made the utilitarian equine obsolete in commercial agriculture, transportation, industry and policing in the post Second World War era. Yet, despite their obvious key roles in power, transportation and military campaigns, historians of Southern Africa have largely neglected horses into their analyses of the past. Swart aims to address this neglect in her book and manages to reinsert horses back into the larger South African historical narrative with admirable success.
The book is divided into eight essays which, though organised chronologically, do not offer an uninterrupted socioenvironmental narrative of the history of horses in South Africa since 1652. Instead, the essays focus on key moments and phases: the introduction of the horse into South Africa during Dutch East India Company rule (1652–1795) and the emergence of the small, hardy, disease resistant Cape Horse out of the fusion over time of heterogeneous stock imported from Java, Persia, South America, North America, England, and Spain; the transformation of the local horse industry away from its preoccupation with utilitarian horses towards English Thoroughbreds bred for speed (in the increasingly popular horse racing market) and pedigree (linking up with human concerns over race and class) in the nineteenth century; the adoption and adaption of horses by the Basotho of Lesotho in the course of the nineteenth century; a welcome new look at the South African War (1899–1902) through the lens of the staggering horse mortality during the war (the British forces, for example, lost nearly 69 per cent of their horses, and the Transvaal 75 per cent of their total national horse herd); questions regarding the quality and quantity of horses in the aftermath of the war, and the decline of the importance of horses in the first half of the twentieth century as mechanisation increasingly rendered the horse obsolete; and the reinvention of the industry after the Second World War as a high-class venture with the introduction of American Saddlebreds, and the rediscovery and celebration, by some, of the Historic Boerperd. The book concludes with an exploration of how to write the history of horses, or as Swart terms it ‘horsetory’.
Her history, which she clearly states is a socioenvironmental history of the horse in South Africa, explores not only the environmental consequences of the introduction of this non-native species into South Africa, but also the socioeconomic aspects, political ramifications, and symbolic and ideological dimensions of horses and horse ownership in South Africa. Importantly, Swart notes that unlike the American West, horses in South Africa came to represent Western civilisation as opposed to freedom and wildness, simply because there were no indigenous horses and no escaped horses to be broken in. She also draws important analogies between discourses over horse breeds and human conceptions of race and class, and situates the changes within the horse industry in the twentieth century within the context of socioeconomic changes within Afrikaner communities, and the emergence of consumer secularism.
Clearly horses and humans influenced each other in complex ways in South Africa. The Basotho of Lesotho, for example, were early adopters of horses during this nation's formative years under Moshoeshoe in the nineteenth century. Horses gave them the military capacity to resist land incursions, and fight wars, and were essential in their integration into the regional economy along with grain, labour, and livestock. On the other hand, while the horse helped transform and solidify the Basotho nation in the nineteenth century, the Lesotho environment, along with anthropogenic and natural selection transformed the original heterogeneous horse stock into the Basotho pony that is typically small (14–14.2 hands) and able to forage for itself.
There is not much to criticise in this book. Clearly much effort went into linking up the various chapters through back and forward references, which leads to the repetition of some information which is, at times, a minor irritation. But it also serves the function of distracting the reader from what is not included in the book. Only after finishing the book did I realise that almost none of the questions that I had about the horse industries in the two Boer Republics in the nineteenth century, the very local racing industries dotted around the country in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (as opposed to the more celebrated national horse races with more famous horses), and inland horse breeding for transportation purposes were even remotely answered. At times it also seemed as though fascinating environmental discussions were cut short in order to make space for the more complex social analyses.
Swart brings many strands of South African social, economic, political and environmental history together in this book, and clearly demonstrates the value of a socioenvironmental approach, as opposed to just an environmental approach in the writing of environmental history. Her superior writing skills enable her to weave together all these strands into a coherent, engaging, critical, and witty narrative that informs the reader of so much more than just the history of the horse in South Africa. South African environmental, social and political history would have been much poorer in the absence of this publication.
