Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Preface
- Chapter 1 ‘But where's the bloody horse?’ Humans, Horses and Historiography
- Chapter 2 The Reins of Power: Equine Ecological Imperialism in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries
- Chapter 3 Blood Horses: Equine Breeding, Lineage and Purity in Nineteenth-century South Africa
- Chapter 4 The Empire Rides Back: An African Response to the Horse in Southern Africa
- Chapter 5 ‘The last of the old campaigners’: Horses in the South African War, c.1899–1902
- Chapter 6 ‘The Cinderella of the livestock industry’: The Changing Role of Horses in the First Half of the Twentieth Century
- Chapter 7 High Horses: Horses, Class and Socio-economic Change in South Africa
- Chapter 8 The World the Horses Made
- Endnotes
- Bibliography
- Permissions
- Index
Chapter 1 - ‘But where's the bloody horse?’ Humans, Horses and Historiography
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 May 2019
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Preface
- Chapter 1 ‘But where's the bloody horse?’ Humans, Horses and Historiography
- Chapter 2 The Reins of Power: Equine Ecological Imperialism in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries
- Chapter 3 Blood Horses: Equine Breeding, Lineage and Purity in Nineteenth-century South Africa
- Chapter 4 The Empire Rides Back: An African Response to the Horse in Southern Africa
- Chapter 5 ‘The last of the old campaigners’: Horses in the South African War, c.1899–1902
- Chapter 6 ‘The Cinderella of the livestock industry’: The Changing Role of Horses in the First Half of the Twentieth Century
- Chapter 7 High Horses: Horses, Class and Socio-economic Change in South Africa
- Chapter 8 The World the Horses Made
- Endnotes
- Bibliography
- Permissions
- Index
Summary
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 southwest 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. 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. 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).
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- Information
- Riding HighHorses, Humans and History in South Africa, pp. 1 - 17Publisher: Wits University PressPrint publication year: 2010