THIS CHAPTER BEGINS where so many stories have ended, with the conclusion of the South African War and the signing of the Treaty of Vereeniging in 1902. Post-bellum, the horse industry was in chaos. Horses had been both central to the war and its worst casualties, with almost half a million killed. The national herds were destroyed: in the Transvaal, 75 per cent of the horses were dead. As the previous chapter explained, the war had necessitated the introduction of a massive number of horses from a range of countries and this flood of exotic stock had smuggled in foreign pathogens. The Repatriation Department faced the Herculean task of restoring the devastated country and dealing with the remaining combat animals. This chapter traces the horse's role up to and following Union in 1910 and through the first two decades of the twentieth century, which saw the horse's position undergo a transformation with the development of the modern state. The chapter then discusses how, as horses were rendered increasingly obsolete in a mechanising economy, they were nostalgically redeployed in literature in the 1930s. The chapter ends with another war, the Second World War, by which time the role of horses – constant for almost three millennia in human history and for three centuries in southern Africa – had been transformed within a single (human) generation.

Aftermath of war

The ‘scorched earth’ anti-guerrilla policy and three years of war had left a shattered rural economy, particularly in the Orange Free State and Transvaal. The effects of war were catastrophic. Locally adapted horses had been increasingly destroyed or commandeered by the British. As the war progressed, there were anxious estimates that only 10,000 mares and foals remained alive in the Orange River Colony and perhaps half that number in the Transvaal. Among the livestock that had survived, disease was rampant. As the previous chapter discussed, the war had been responsible, for importing poorly inspected stock from all over the world and then moving the animals throughout the sub-region in defiance of basic veterinary precautions. Thus, to the endemic diseases of biliary, horse sickness, gall sickness, blue tongue, rinderpest and heart water were added the fresh horrors of glanders, redwater, mange, scab and infectious pneumonia.