IN THE FIRST half of the twentieth century there was a seismic shift in the relationship between horses and humans in commercial South Africa as ‘horsepower’ stopped implying equine military-agricultural potential and came to mean 746 watts of power. By the 1940s the South African horse industry faced a crisis. There was an over-production of horses, exacerbated by restrictions imposed by the Second World War, which rendered export to international markets difficult. Farm mechanisation was proceeding apace and vehicle numbers were doubling every decade. As the previous chapter has shown, there were doomed attempts to slow the relentless mechanisation of state transport. As late as 1949 the Horse and Mule Breeders Association issued a desperate appeal to the minister of railways and transport to stall mechanisation and use animal transport wherever possible. Futile efforts were made to reorientate the industry towards slaughtering horses for ‘native consumption’ or sending chilled equine meat to Belgium. Remount Services had been transferred to the Department of Agriculture, a significant bureaucratic step reflecting the final acknowledgement of equine superfluity to the modern military. As the previous chapter discussed, the so-called ‘Cinderella of the livestock industry’ had to reinvent itself to survive.

A new breed of horses thus entered the landscape of the platteland: the American Saddlebred. Unlike the horses that had preceded them, these creatures were show horses. The breed was noted for its showy action in all paces, its swanlike neck with ‘aristocratic arch’ and its uplifted tail. These horses could not be used for ordinary farm work; they were largely stable based in the show season and taken out of their stalls only for exercise and shows. A Saddlebred was the consummate leisure horse. It was the ‘ultimate showhorse’ – the ‘peacock of the show ring’ – and a highly visible marker of disposable income. As a conspicuous signifier, the Saddlebred provides a useful method of tracing and understanding social transformation in a rapidly changing South Africa. This chapter offers an interpretation of the socio-cultural symbolic role of this animal in the South African platteland milieu. It explores the introduction of the Saddlebred to South Africa from the United States and the rise of the Saddle horse ‘industry’, predominately in the Afrikaans-speaking, agrarian sectors of the then Cape Province and Orange Free State.