Riding High: Horses, Humans and History in South Africa - Softcover

Swart, Sandra

 
9781868145140: Riding High: Horses, Humans and History in South Africa
Softcover
ISBN 10: 186814514X ISBN 13: 9781868145140
Verlag: Wits University Press, 2010

Inhaltsangabe

An examination of the role of horses in the colonial economies of South Africa
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. Finally, the book speculates about what a new kind of history that takes animals seriously might offer us.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Sandra Swart is Professor in the Department of History at Stellenbosch University, South Africa.

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Riding High

Horses, Humans and History in South Africa

By Sandra Swart

Wits University Press

Copyright © 2010 Sandra Swart
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-86814-514-0

Contents

Acknowledgments, vi, 
Preface, vii, 
Chapter 1: 'But where's the bloody horse?' Humans, Horses and Historiography, 1, 
Chapter 2: The Reins of Power: Equine Ecological Imperialism in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, 18, 
Chapter 3: Blood Horses: Equine Breeding, Lineage and Purity in Nineteenth-century South Africa, 38, 
Chapter 4: The Empire Rides Back: An African Response to the Horse in Southern Africa, 77, 
Chapter 5: 'The last of the old campaigners': Horses in the South African War, c.1899-190, 103, 
Chapter 6: 'The Cinderella of the livestock industry': The Changing Role of Horses in the First Half of the Twentieth Century, 137, 
Chapter 7: High Horses: Horses, Class and Socio-economic Change in South Africa, 171, 
Chapter 8: The World the Horses Made, 194, 
Endnotes, 221, 
Bibliography, 300, 
Permissions, 331, 
Index, 333,


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. 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). 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 worl

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Verlag
Wits University Press
Erscheinungsdatum
2010
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
186814514X
ISBN 13 
9781868145140
Einband
Tapa blanda
Anzahl der Seiten
360
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Verantwortliche Person
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