BLOOD HAS SATURATED the horse world. Its human inhabitants have deployed a vocabulary suffused with the sanguinary: ‘bloodstock’, ‘blood heads’, ‘full bloods’, ‘warm bloods’, ‘cold bloods’, ‘hot bloods’, ‘bloodlines’ and ‘blood weeds’. Horse blood has played significant roles in human history; indeed, some humans have cared about equine blood for longer than they have about their own. Horse and human blood have even co-mingled. This chapter explores ideas about blood in several different contexts in nineteenth-century South Africa, particularly in the Cape Colony. The emphasis is on how these ideas, partly permeating from the metropole and partly vernacular, influenced both people and horses in a range of ways from changes within colonial society to the genetic development of the horse itself. The focus is firstly on how breeding regimes, centred on blood, reflected shifting social preoccupations, both practical and ideological. Secondly, the chapter offers an analysis of the constant interplay between state officials and private breeders and between official discourse and popular ideas that helped shape this process. The expression superciliously used by those whose veins carried socially approved blood and who despised the ill-bred, both human and animal, was ‘blood will tell’ – and, indeed, it does. Blood tells a story about both the horses and humans of nineteenth-century South Africa.

First blood

As we have seen, in sub-Saharan Africa there was no ‘wild’ horse blood. Breeding was never easy and, unlike in North and South America, significant feral populations did not arise. As the previous chapter explained, zebras – the ‘blood brothers’ of the horse – did not prove suitable for the settlers’ needs. The various ruling elites were at pains to transform the indigenising equine stock throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The initial Dutch settler horse stock was set up with ponies from Sumbawa, and by the later eighteenth century other working breeds were fused to form the hardy, utilitarian Cape horse, which was later exported through the global imperial network to India and Australia. Thus, the robust little Indonesian ponies received several injections of various bloodlines. As previously discussed, this Cape Horse was a mixture of the South-east Asian or ‘Javanese’ pony, Persians, South and North Americans, English Thoroughbreds and a few Spanish Andalusians. Over time, one ‘breed’ (or, more correctly, phenotypical type) came to predominate and be regarded as the Cape horse.