Race Politics: Horse Racing, Identity and Power in South Africa

Abstract

This essay discusses modern traditional or rural African horse racing in South Africa, with a focus on the relationship between its history and current realties, and the tension between the global and the local. This chapter shows how the segregationist state increasingly excluded Africans from participating in state-sanctioned commercial horse racing (other than as punters). Some Africans used the racing world to challenge Apartheid’s authoritarian codes and, after 1994, to create new identities in democratic South Africa. Moreover, the state drove African horse racing underground in the rural areas and kept it informal where it was permitted, but this chapter demonstrates how Africans resisted this suppression by keeping a lively rural racing (and betting) tradition alive. This led to vernacular racing traditions, which drew on the forms and structures of the commercial sector, but adapted them over times for local conditions and politico-cultural purposes. The chapter’s key argument is about global “human-horse cultures” more broadly: that cultures of horsemanship might have a localised, vernacular flavour—but that they are generally a fusion of ideas and practices from various sources and cultures, that changes over time. This chapter will show that there were indeed vernacular traditions informing local horse cultures, but there has been deep cultural connectedness and historical links between “white” and “black” horse cultures.