ONE OF THE first European settlers in southern Africa was a horse. This creature was the sole survivor of a mid-seventeenth century shipwreck on the Cape of Storms. Wearing the decaying remnants of a rope halter, he was occasionally glimpsed by the sailors who arrived with the first wave of white settlement, but had become so wild he could not be caught. He was the only ‘wild’ horse to exist in the Cape. Although species of the genus Equus – like the zebra and ass – have been present in Africa since earlier times, the horse (Equus caballus) is not indigenous, but was introduced into the continent. Although in regular use in North and West Africa from 600 CE, there were no horses in the southern tip prior to European colonisation. African horse sickness and trypanosomiasis presented a pathogenic barrier to horses reaching the Cape overland. Indeed, sub-Saharan Africa had the worst disease environment for equids in the world. The barrier presented to horses meant a barrier to certain groups of humans too. So, it was with difficulty that Equus became an element of the ‘portmanteau biota’ that followed European settlement of southern Africa from the mid-seventeenth century. Horses were the first domestic stock imported by the settlers; and the early modern colonial state that had emerged by the end of the eighteenth century – despite resistance from both indigenous groups and the metropole – was based, at least in part, on the power of the horse in the realm of agriculture, the military and communications.

This chapter seeks to explore a particular facet of horse–human relationships, focusing on their introduction at the Cape and its consequent symbolic and practical ramifications. The growth of the colonial state and the rise of the Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie (VOC, or Dutch East India Company) from the seventeenth century had considerable consequences for the human and equine populations under its sway, linking far-flung South-east Asia and the southern tip of Africa. The ‘invention’ of new horse breeds meant the dissemination of equine genes and phenotypes from Europe, Asia and the Americas and their fusion through deliberate state intervention, idealistic individual efforts by groups of breeders and often by the everyday politics of economic pragmatism.