Nicola Huntingford, the Afrikaner and the Perfect Horse

Circa 1957

Mum and Violet. Kenya, circa 1958.

Sometimes memory does a trick of packaging events together so that they are conveniently conflated and easier to retrieve. In this way, Mum remembers nothing of the circus that came through Eldoret in the mid-1950s except that Nane left with it. “I suppose my mother must have thought that he had knocked me out one too many times,” she says, “so off he went to feed the lions.” Mum gives a little gulp. “And I don’t know if this is the way I imagined it, or if this really happened, but I have a picture in my head of Nane bouncing off down the road behind bars, peering back at me, with big pleading eyes.”

“Oh, that’s awful,” I say.

Mum thinks about this for a moment. “Yes, it was,” she says. Then she looks uncomfortable and I can tell she does not want to seem like an ungrateful Christopher-bloody-Robin type. So she clears her throat and revises the story, assuming a stiff upper lip for the task. “Well,” she says, “I’m sure my parents didn’t tell me he was going to feed the lions at the time. I am sure they told me that Nane had run away to join the circus. Trapeze artists, dancing bears, happy days.”

My grandparents asked knowledgeable friends to source a really good replacement for Nane. In their minds, they pictured a Thoroughbred, something largehearted and bold that could match my Mum’s courage and skill in the show-jumping arena. Golden Duckling, the horse the friends selected, was very well bred by King Midas out of Cold Duck. “She was a great big Thoroughbred,” Mum says, “pretty head, nice neck, she was perfectly put together until you got to her legs.” Mum pauses from dramatic effect. “They were sawed off.”

I look suitably horrified.

“I know,” Mum says. “We all stood in the stable yard in Nairobi staring at this apparition, but we were too polite to tell the friends who were supposed to be experts that they had selected a dud. Sawed-off legs and curved hocks”—Mum turns her elbows out in an impression of a horse with bad conformation—“which meant she’d just fall down in the middle of whatever you were doing. Oh,” she adds, “and she had an absolutely murderous disposition.”

Nevertheless Mum—brought up by her parents not to complain almost no matter what—gamely paid forty pounds of her own money for the horse (more than half a century later she remembers with undiminished resentment the exact amount), and the thing was hauled home in the back of a truck. “Well, Duckling wasn’t ideal,” Mum admits. “In fact she was pretty awful, but she was what I had.” So Mum entered show-jumping competitions as before, and as before she contributed significantly to everyone’s entertainment. “I usually left the arena unconscious, strapped to a stretcher, dripping blood,” she says with a happy smile.

For a year or two the homicidal, sawed-off Thoroughbred bashed Mum senseless week after week and Mum gamely hauled herself back onto the creature for more punishment. And then—beginning in the year Mum turned thirteen—an almost biblical series of events brought her Violet, a horse of such shining perfection that none of the scores of other horses she has owned since have ever quite rivaled that one, flawless animal.

“In 1957, there were terrific floods in Eldoret,” Mum says. “Water roared down the passageway, the choo was submerged, the cows and horses stood around up to their knees in mud, the roads washed away, the mud bricks on all the buildings got soggy, the walls sagged, the roof leaked, the laundry never dried, frogs moved into the house.” This went on for weeks and by the time the sun did come out again, the community was very rundown and measles broke out. “It started in the villages, then the old ladies next door got sick, then half the kids in my school got sick plus all the nuns. Then the Polish refugees keeled over and finally my father caught it,” Mum says.

My grandfather had to lie in a darkened room for a couple of months. “Doctor Reynolds told him not to read, but of course he did and ruined his eyesight forever.” And my grandmother was run ragged taking care of sick people. She took meat and milk to the Nandi villages; she ferried soup and bread up to the old ladies. She visited the sick boarding-school children and took clean linens to the nuns. She fed the Polish refugees—“Eldoret was smothered in them for some reason,” Mum says, “and they all insisted they were princesses and counts. Very unlikely, I would have said”—and finally she came back to bathe my grandfather’s rash in calamine lotion and give him his supper.

One morning, into this overwrought and distracted atmosphere, Flip Prinsloo arrived at the Huntingford’s door, the brim of his sweat-stained felt hat clutched in his fists, and asked to see Mrs. Huntingford. My grandmother ordered tea from the drunken Cherito and sat out on the veranda with Flip. It says something about my grandmother—and about Flip, for that matter—that the two of them waited for the tea tray to arrive in perfectly companionable silence. It also says something about the depth of Flip’s desperation that he had come to a British woman for help. “You see,” Mum explains, “in Eldoret, there was a big group of very British settlers, like our family. And then there was a quite big group of very Afrikaner settlers, like Flip. And of course the two groups did not mix at all.” Mum narrows her eyes. “The Boer War,” she says darkly. “Never, ever forget the Boer War, Bobo. They certainly haven’t.”

THE DUTCH ARRIVED in South Africa at the Cape of Good Hope, on the southwestern tip of Africa, in 1652. To begin with, they saw themselves not as settlers but as temporary workers, there to grow vegetables for the Dutch East India Company’s ships sailing between Holland and Indonesia. But by the early 1700s, independent trekboers—nomadic farmers—had broken away from the Dutch East India Company and were pushing into the wild, pepper-scented land to the north, displacing the native Khoikhoi. Over time, these trekboers began to call themselves Afrikaners (Africans) to mark their sense of a new identity as distinct and separate from the Dutch. And they developed a distinct language—Afrikaans—basic Dutch salted with whatever other languages were floating around the Cape at that time.

In 1795, the British, looking to protect their sea routes and alarmed by the empire-building intentions of other European countries, sent an expedition to the Cape and easily forced the Dutch to surrender, but they hadn’t counted on—or recognized—the increasingly cohesive and nationalistic sensibilities of the Afrikaners. By the mid 1830s, British rule had so disgusted the Afrikaners (the 1834 emancipation of slaves was the final straw) that about twelve thousand of them responded by emigrating far into the interior—the Great Trek, it was called afterward—and setting up two of their own independent Afrikaner-run republics, the Orange Free State and the Transvaal.

War is Africa’s perpetual ripe fruit. There is so much injustice to resolve, such desire for revenge in the blood of the people, such crippling corruption of power, such unseemly scramble for the natural resources. The wind of power shifts and there go the fruit again, tumbling toward the ground, each war more inventively terrible than the last. In 1880, the British confiscated a Boer’s wagon because he had not paid his taxes. Needing nothing but the smallest of excuses, the Boers retaliated by declaring war against the British. Within a year, the British had been defeated. The Afrikaners would later call this their First War of Independence. The British would call it the First Anglo-Boer War.

But the subsequent gold rush of 1886 attracted even more British to the Boer republics. Never forgetting their resentment, the Afrikaners refused to let the British vote. Even by the 1890s, when there were more British than Afrikaners in the republics, the Afrikaners denied the British the vote. This provoked the Second Anglo-Boer War, or what the Afrikaners called the Second War of Freedom, in October 1899. This time the British took no chances. Four hundred fifty thousand soldiers came to South Africa from Britain, Australia, New Zealand and Canada to fight fewer than sixty thousand Boers. This time the war was longer and even more excessively nasty and brutish than the last.

Although the Afrikaners had no official army, they had been on the continent for two centuries and they had the land in their blood (to say nothing of their blood in the land). They needed no barracks or uniforms, and no generals to give them orders. They had sturdy horses, strong men and tenacious women. Their children were crack shots, raised to be tough and self-sufficient. On the other hand, the British troops wore impractical red jackets that shone out of the blond high veldt like stoplights. They didn’t understand the language of this wide, sad land, nor did they love it. The only way they could win the war was backhandedly—by starving and diseasing the Afrikaners out of existence. So between 1901 and 1902, the British scorched more than thirty thousand farms and placed almost all the Afrikaner women and children in the world’s first concentration camps. As many as twenty-nine thousand Boers died from the appalling conditions in those camps; so did twenty thousand blacks who had been caught working on Boer farms. By the time a peace treaty was signed at the town of Vereeniging on May 21, 1902, the British army had killed nearly one quarter of all the Boers in existence.

Flip Prinsloo had come to Kenya as a baby with his parents and forty-seven other Afrikaner families from the Transvaal. The families were mostly bywoners (poor tenant farmers who had no hope of purchasing land of their own) or hensoppers (those who had surrendered to the British during the Boer War and who now found the shame of that surrender unbearable). Both the bywoners and the hensoppers wanted a large piece of free, unoccupied African land on which to settle. The last thing they wanted—having done little else in living memory—was to have to fight or die for that land. “But there it was and they were welcome to it,” Mum says. “No one else had settled there—too windy and far-flung for the tastes of most people.”

The Uasin Gishu plateau on which the town of Eldoret now sits had been occupied in precolonial times first by the Sirikwa, then by the Masai and finally by the Nandi. In other words, the British considered it “unoccupied,” a perceived emptiness that irked them. Consequently, they offered it to the Zionists as a temporary refuge for Russian Jews until a homeland in Israel could be established. But the Zionists rejected the offer, some of them weeping openly at the 1903 sixth Zionist Congress and quoting from Psalm 137, “How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land? If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning. If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth; if I prefer not Jerusalem above my chief joy.”

So in semidesperation the British offered the land to British-abhorring Afrikaners from the Transvaal, and in 1908 more than two hundred Boers arrived by ship in Mombasa, Kenya. They took trains as far as Nakuru, where they purchased native oxen, which they trained to pull wagons all through the long rainy season of March, April and May. At the end of May, they began to climb from the Rift Valley, up the escarpment to their new homeland. It took them two months to cover one hundred miles, the wagons churning through mud up to the tops of their wheels and the forest dense and impassable in places. The trekkers cut bamboo to make causeways across swamps. The drivers stayed near the oxen, urging them step by slithering step.

In a wetland at the top of the escarpment a wagon loaded with sugar sank up to its axles and all the sugar melted. While the trekkers struggled for days to free the wagon, a two-year-old girl died of pneumonia. The young men planted poles and created a rudimentary sacred site for the funeral, and the Afrikaners grieved in the way of stoical people, tight lipped and moist eyed. They buried the girl in a place which they called Suiker Vlei—Sugar Vlei—and the next day they freed the wagon and continued the journey to the Sosiani River.

“There was at that time,” Mum says, “a hunter called Cecil Hoey who lived on the other side of what would become Eldoret. He saw what he thought was a long stream of smoke snaking its way up the escarpment onto the highlands. And then he realized he was seeing the pale canvas of covered wagons winding up to the plateau. It was the trekkers arriving.” Mum says, “Cecil took one look at that lot and predicted the end of the wildlife. He was right because when those Afrikaners first got there they had nothing to live off except what they could kill, and they finished off all the animals in no time.”

The Afrikaners made harrows from branches and thorns bound with leather thongs made from zebra skin, they made soap from eland fat and they made shoes from the hides of giraffes. They ate what they could snare or shoot and they lived in grass-thatched houses made from their own mud bricks, baked in the high-altitude sun. “A lot of them were very basic,” Mum says. “They weren’t educated and they didn’t read anything except the Bible. But they were tough and resourceful and they could live off nothing, those people.” And then she sniffs and I can tell that it wounds her to make this next admission. “Well, that was most of them. But some of them were quite posh. One Afrikaner family was so posh that the Queen Mother stayed with them when she came to Kenya in 1959.” Mum pauses to let me absorb this startling knowledge. “Imagine that,” she says. “There’s no way our shoddy little house would have been fit for royalty, but there they were—those posh Afrikaners—entertaining the Queen Mother!”

AT LAST CHERITO LURCHED ONTO the veranda with a tray of tea and a bottle of my grandmother’s homemade wine.

“Thank you,” my grandmother said.

Cherito staggered back into the kitchen. My grandmother’s hand hovered over the tray. “Tea, Mr. Prinsloo?” she offered. “Or something a little stronger?”

Flip blinked.

My grandmother poured them both a glass of wine. “It burns a little at first,” she warned, “but it’s not bad once you get used to it.” She took a sip of her wine. “Here’s to us.” She raised her glass. “There’re none like us, and if there were, they’re all dead.”

Flip took a sip.

“What do you think?” my grandmother asked.

Flip’s lips were stuck to his teeth, so he did not answer.

“Not bad, eh?” My grandmother poured herself another glass. “Mud in your eye,” she said. The second glass tasted better than the first, and working off the theory that the third would therefore be better than the second, my grandmother gave herself another helping. “To absent friends!” she cried. Which was how, when Flip finally got around to the reason for his visit, he found my grandmother in a pleasantly receptive mood.

“I’ve been watching your daughter riding,” Flip said suddenly.

My grandmother narrowed her eyes at him. “Have you?”

“I like her style,” he said. “Lots of blood.”

“Well,” my grandmother said, “I suppose that’s one way of looking at it.”

There was a long pause. Flip cleared his throat. “Dingaan’s Day is coming up,” he said.

Each year on December 16 Afrikaners everywhere celebrated Dingaan’s Day. The most significant date in their calendar, it memorialized a battle in 1838 when a Voortrekker column defeated Dingaan’s Zulu warriors on the banks of a river in modern-day KwaZulu-Natal. In Zulu they call that battle iMpi yaseNcome, the Battle of Ncome River. In Afrikaans they say it was Slag van Bloedrivier, the Battle of Blood River. But whatever you call it, the outcome was the same. On that day—with everything you can imagine going against them—four hundred seventy Voortrekkers roundly defeated tens of thousands of Zulu warriors. By nightfall, the Ncome River ran red with the blood of three thousand slain Zulus. No Afrikaners were killed in the battle and only three were wounded. This proved, the Afrikaners said, that their tribe had a divine right to exist on South African land.

My grandmother sighed and looked with some regret at her empty wineglass. “So it is,” she said. “How time flies.”

Flip cleared his throat again. “I want to beat my cousin Pieter at the Dingaan Day races,” he said.

My grandmother sat up. If there was one thing calculated to catch her interest, even through the fog of her homemade fig wine and lots of violent history, it was horse racing. “Is that so?”

“Yes,” Flip said.

“Do you have a good horse?” My grandmother gave a little hiccup and wagged her finger at Flip. “That’s the thing to win a race,” she said. “A good horse.”

“I’ve got a very good horse,” Flip said. “But I need someone who will ride it. My sons.... Agh no, man.” Flip put his head in his enormous hands. “They’re no good.” He looked at my grandmother, his eyes desperate. “I want your daughter.”

My grandmother gave another hiccup.

“I’ll pay her,” Flip offered.

My grandmother looked horrified and flapped a hand at Flip. “No, no, no. Don’t be silly.” She hiccuped again. “You must have her for nothing. Free to good friends. Go ahead. Take her.”

SO THE NEXT AFTERNOON, Flip Prinsloo came to the house and picked up Mum and drove her to his farm. “He had a bottle of South African brandy under his seat,” Mum says, “and he’d take slurps out of it as we drove along. He offered me some, but I wasn’t about to drink from a bottle that some scrubby old Afrikaner had been gulping out of.” To make up for this, Flip bought my mother an enormous slab of chocolate when he stopped at the Venus Bar to replenish his brandy supply. “Which gave me spots,” Mum warns. “So that was an important lesson. If someone offers you either brandy or chocolate, you should always take the brandy.”

At the farm, Mum was left alone in a dimly lit sitting room while lunch was prepared. “All the furniture pressed against the skirting boards and a host of immensely chilling ancestors glared down from the walls,” Mum says. Lunch was an awkward affair: “A very severe wife, a couple of hulking sons and one crushed-looking daughter-in-law.” Except for the occasional outburst in Afrikaans, the family ate in silence. “I didn’t understand what they said, but it certainly sounded as if they were plotting to kill me,” she says.

Boiled mutton—“Grisly,” Mum says—was followed by stewed coffee and fried sweetbreads, and then Flip reached for his sweat-stained hat and pushed himself away from the table. “Time to race,” he said. The sons wiped their lips and stood up. They, too, reached for their veldskoen hats. “Kom,” Flip told Mum.

The farm was on the edge of the plateau, and even though the Prinsloos had been cultivating it for fifty years, the buildings looked inadequate and hasty in the face of all the earth and sky they were trying to command. The place had a haunted feel, as if it were in mourning for its old self. From a roughhewn livestock shed a syce emerged, leading three horses: two ordinary-looking geldings and a bay mare plunging at the end of her lead rope.

“Dit is jou perd,” Flip told Mum. “Violet.”

Mum was speechless.

“I’ll never forget the first time I saw her,” she says. “I don’t think she ever had two feet on the ground at any one time. She wasn’t tall but she had these long elegant legs, and a powerful chest. I could see, just looking at her, that she could run like the wind.”

“Well,” Flip said. “Op jou merka. First one to the end of the maize field wins.”

Without warning and certainly without waiting for my mother, the Prinsloo sons leaped onto the two geldings and took off along the edge of a maize field. “Those Afrikaners didn’t know how to train horses,” Mum says. “They just put very savage bits in their mouths and rode like mad.” Mum was still hopping about, trying to get her leg over the saddle, when Violet took off after the other horses.

“I don’t know how I stayed on,” Mum says. “But I did. I somehow managed to scramble up into the saddle with the mare at full gallop, grab the reins and hang on while she flew up the maize field. And I beat the sons, both of whom had tumbled down antbear holes long before the finish line.”

That December, Mum won the Dingaan’s Day race on Violet, outpacing Flip Prinsloo’s cousin Pieter by lengths. Flip was drunk with victory. He bought Mum slabs and slabs of chocolate at the Venus Bar and he offered to marry her off to his sons. “One was about thirteen and the other was already married,” Mum says. “But Flip said that didn’t matter. He said I could have either, or both—whichever I wanted.”

“I don’t want your sons,” Mum told Flip. She didn’t want the chocolate either. She wanted Violet.

Flip shook his head. “No, not the horse,” he said.

“If I can’t have her, I won’t ride her,” Mum said.

Flip fingered his hat. “Is that so?”

“Yes,” Mum said.

In the end, Mum and Flip struck a deal. She could borrow the horse all year for show jumping and hacking—anything she wanted—as long as she would ride for him every year on Dingaan’s Day.

“Done,” Mum said, shaking one of Flip Prinsloo’s enormous hands.

Flip fetched the brandy bottle from under his seat and took a long swallow. “Op Violet,” he said, offering Mum a sip.

Mum put the bottle to her lips. “To Violet,” she agreed.

So for the first time in her life, Mum won everything she entered: show jumping, racing, bending poles. “That mare had one speed: flat out. No one could stop her. I couldn’t stop her. But I could just about steer her and as long as I could stay on, we won, we won, we won. We won everything.”