The Empire Rides Back: Horses and Humans and Resistance in Southern Africa

The capacity to dispossess land by means of the dyad of conquest – horses and guns – was at the core of southern Africa’s colonial history. There were strenuous efforts to contain the horse within the colonial grasp. However, this paper shows that these attempts failed. Horses were to become pivotal in the defining processes of the nineteenth century, which saw societal convulsions, conflicts and reorganisations. Chiefdoms broke apart, migrated and merged. The human contours shifted, as smaller family-based communities were transformed into larger militarised proto-states. An escalating arms race ensued, with ever-increasing efficiency in killing. This paper looks at how horses were wrested from the grasp of white hands and how they  were used to resist colonial incursions and indigenous threats by improving military capacity and integration into the regional cash economy, creating conditions favourable to the complex processes of state building.

A prevailing trope in environmental history has been how domestic animals aided human invaders in suppressing indigenous societies. The history of African reactions to the horse – even in this circumscribed telling – perhaps demonstrates a less imperialist side to ‘invasive’ species, or at least presents a much more complicated and shifting picture. Looking to imperial history and its ecological disruptions and focusing explicitly on the material contexts of the violence (both physical and figurative) that is connected to horses must not blind one to their role in resistance. This paper will argue that horses served to represent an early attempt at symbolic and intellectual resistance to the colonial metropole. With the undeniable military advantage they lent the emerging state that allowed it to take on encroaching neighbouring powers, including imperial Britain, leads one to ask: Was the horse not merely an instrument of ecological imperialism, as Crosby suggests, but also an instrument of resistance?