THE DRIVE NORTHWARDS HELD little to no recall of anything a confused, thirsty and hungry horse would want to recall. At one stage they had crossed a wide river.
Then there was a slow haul up a mountainside in the hot afternoon sun and an even longer, hotter descent. The horses jumped each time the air brakes bellowed. As the truck descended it grew noticeably warmer and for the first time there were lots of trees. That would have been the Magaliesberg, a low range that marked the ecotone, or biological divide, between the temperate Highveld grassland and the Bushveld plains that stretched from there all the way to Timbuktu.
The veld here was garlanded with monkey-thorn acacias, wild bushwillows, silver cluster-leaf and wag-’n-bietjie thorn trees. If by mistake you backed into one you would have to wait a bit until someone came to extricate you and chances were they would not escape unhooked and unbloodied either. In African lore the spirit of a deceased person can be carried in a branch, and if that person has died far from home, buried in their place.
The truck had slowed down and turned onto a dirt road. Tall gum trees delineated various fields. They had been planted more than 100 years previously because nothing sucks up water like a blue gum. In doing so a swamp had been turned into pasture, which was good for the livestock but not so good for the wildlife that once roamed the area.
The four horses, weary from a day travelling in the open truck, were driven into a yard surrounded by red-brick working buildings. There was a bus nearby with a group of 30 or 40 young, playful youths milling about. With them was an older, very tall man who was clearly in charge. When the truck stopped he marched over to talk to the driver.
Where are these horses from?
How long have you been on the road?
Where did you stop for food?
He asked in a soft tone that anyone with brains between his ears would have read with caution.
“We stopped in Bloem for breakfast, and then at this Portchi take-away near the Joburg abattoir,” the driver said grinning. “Yirra, those okes make such a kiff peri-peri chicken, I bet they could open a franchise. Then I could give up this kak job and open up one in Kroonstad …”
The tall man’s eyes had narrowed.
“I meant the horses, you doos.”
The horses were electrified with tension. Their mouths were gummy with dried saliva. The two drivers knew nothing of animals. They were simply delivering a load from another estate gone belly-up. The tall man had called over to the crowd, his students, who had grown quiet.
“So you want to learn about horses. Come over here and learn something then.”
The big man opened the back hatch of the truck and climbed into the load area. The horses shied. He quickly summed them up, saw one was wilder than the other three bouncing back onto their haunches and stomping in threat. He noted one, the chestnut, was already gelded. Two others were stallions but were not overly agitated in the situation but clearly the fourth, the dark Namibian bay, would need to be gelded in order to fit into the Karl Plaas regimen. In Fire’s case to stop him killing the other horses. He was one intimidating steed.
The man untied the dark bay’s lead rope from the retaining bars and held it tight with his left hand. Luckily the familiar smells of the stable helped to diffuse the horses’ pent-up fear. With his right hand the man reached slowly to the horse’s head. It jerked back. He put his hand on its muzzle; it jerked back again but the man held on. Again he put his hand on its muzzle, then quickly but smoothly gripped its top lip between his second and third fingers and twisted.
“Ooooh!” some of the students cried out.
“And that is how you do the twitch,” he told them from his elevated platform. “Settles a nervy horse every time. You can even buy twitches if your fingers aren’t strong enough. Slowly, slowly catcha de monkey,” he said in a mock African accent. The students winced whenever he did that: he was white and they were all black. But the horse suddenly seemed to calm down and with that it was easily led off the truck.
Grooms appeared. Fire was led away and one by one the other horses were guided off the trailer and taken across a cobbled courtyard to be hosed down, all the while lapping up water from the nozzle. Once inside they were put into their own stalls and feedbags filled. Things henceforth would be structured, if dull. Dull was far better than stress for horses, which have an uncanny disposition for nerviness.
A surprise for Fire was finding several other Namibian wild horses in the stables. Much whinnying back and forth further helped settle the new arrivals. When Onderstepoort was offered a consignment of wild horses, so long as they were gelded first to keep things calm, they grabbed them. Their Hanoverian bloodline was highly sought after to embolden the prevailing stolid Boereperd genealogy of the region. Although “stolid” might be an undeserved description for this breed that had proved itself as perhaps the greatest performer in southern Africa.
The first stock had arrived at the Cape with the early Dutch settlers, imported from Java to help the tiny settlement with the heavy work of creating a new country. Some 15 years later that original bloodline was bolstered by a shipwreck full of the finest Arab blood from none less than the stables of the Shah of Persia. By 1800 there were around 22 000 of what was then called the Cape Horse – “well known for its sound temperament, bravery, intelligence, endurance, extreme sure-footedness and hardiness.” Since then the breed has enjoyed infusions of Flemish, Hackney, Norfolk Trotter, Saddler and Cleveland Bay blood.
The Bergsig horses were the last arrivals for a new programme that was about to commence at the famous veterinarian institute. The Bersig four were all well-schooled and were, including Fire, by comparison to the rest of the Karl Plaas bunch, star performers. This was first noted by the tall, bearded lecturer from the Technikon who was a horseman first and academic only second.
He appreciated good riding horses when he saw them. Not that he ever showed much outward affection. For him horses were working animals. Simple. It was like African men and their hunting dogs. You might say they loved them for they had a tight working bond with the scrawny Canis africanuses. But the dogs felt love only at the end of a boot or knobkerrie. There was a saying that if you had been particularly bad in a previous life you came back as a Bushman’s dog.
In spring each year the grasslands around Onderstepoort burst alive with blackjacks and their annoying barbed seeds. The plants had arrived on the Highveld along with horse fodder brought in during the Boer War and spread across the grasslands along with the blood of old soldiers. South Africa’s poppy fields of remembrance.
Every child and his dog that played in the veld came home with thorns in their feet and their clothes peppered with blackjacks; the prickly seeds will stick to your clothes like snot balls to a finger. It’s highly annoying having to sit and pick them off one by one, but rather that than risk an ear-warmer from your mom for throwing seed-crusted clothes into the wash basket.
All horse owners in the region knew that blackjacks could become entangled in forelocks and become a great irritant. The first sign was when your horse started tossing its head insistently. It was best to keep fetlock hair short and to always check horse blankets for blackjacks and other burrs and grass seeds. If left unchecked they would cause infected sores.
As if he did not have enough troubles with the box hoof, at one time Zulu got a blackjack seed lodged under his numnah while out herding the cattle that were the main research subjects of Onderstepoort. His minders, grooms and students were surprised when this normally placid horse became suddenly irritable. The seed, just one centimetre in length and invisible against the horse’s dark coat, evaded detection during grooming and so began its insidious work.
Zulu became irritable, struggling at saddle-up time and fitful when mounted. The first thing you check when a horse starts behaving erratically and out of character is its diet. Nothing there had changed. Then the feet. All clear. It was only when the tiny wound on his back erupted in an angry septic bubble that the cause of the trouble was located. Which was a relief for all, since by that time Zulu was stretching the limits of his rental agreement.
Onderstepoort straddles a shallow valley of the Apies River (named after a type of thorn tree). The river is more of a stream really that flows lazily between the Magaliesberg range and a row of conical koppies to the north. Just where the land rises towards the row of koppies, maybe a dozen in all, you will find the Bon Accord Dam, but it was not always so.
Where the Apies River wends its way close to those koppies there used to be a large vlei. Before the emergence of the veterinary institute with its need for an ample water supply the vlei would be mostly dry in winter. But in summer it would become a breeding ground for insects, notably mozzies and miggies.
This bucolic setting and its current air of organised fertility hides a troubled past. The first records of the area came down to us from ivory hunters who roamed the wild realms around 200 years ago. Of course, people had lived there long before that. What we know of them comes from scant scratchings around the old Iron Age sites, but while they could mine minerals and cast ingots of both iron and gold they did not write.
The Magaliesberg is and has been for a very long time a place of refuge. If you took one of Bill Harrop’s famous balloon flips, or you were one of the black eagles that nest in the canyons of the modest mountains, you would see a criss-crossing maze of narrow kloofs that dissect the range alternately at 70 and 120 degrees, the exact same configuration of the quartz crystals that form these mountains. If ever you were looking for a solid example of seeing the world in a grain of sand, this would do.
In times of trouble, Onderstepoort, the under-most kloof, offered the easiest passage. Today it carries the N1 carriageway on its northwards journey towards Cairo. The range was named for a Chief Mohale who sought refuge in its kloofs from the breakaway Zulu warlord Mzilikazi.
Mzilikazi had been one of King Shaka’s most favoured generals who decided he wanted his own piece of Africa. When his rampaging impi, soft-of-foot from the green hills of kwaZulu, reached the valley of the Apies River they complained about the spiky little devil thorns they had to run over. So the warlord had them collected in truck loads (or whatever they used in those days to collect large amounts of things) and, seated in splendour, had them dance for him. Anyone who so much as winced was put to the spear.
Everyone who came of age in that region endured a certain rite of passage. Paper thorns were easy to brush off even in mid stride, but dubbeltjies, devil thorns with their fiendish woody spikes, were no laughing matter. If you didn’t spot the long tendrils of the plant’s soft green compound leaves as you ran across the veld you would dance: the pain was instant and unbearable, so you would hop, first on one foot then the other, one hand on the ground then the other and finally onto your bum while your barefooted friends fell about laughing. Everyone got their turn to strut the Bushveld waltz.
What Mzilikazi had not factored in was the arrival of the Voortrekkers a few years later. At first he tried to kill them and, for a while, he was quite successful at it. However, with his spears and cattle-hide shields against their horses and guns, it soon became apparent it was he who would have to move on.
Back along the banks of the Apies River, with no other serious contenders around, the Trekkers called a halt to their ox wagons and settled down. In time they morphed from Voortrekkers (pioneers) into Boers (farmers). But it certainly was not all guns and roses since Africa is a tough place, full of thorns, poisonous snakes and even more deadly goggas.
Especially in summer when the swampy valley buzzed with the sound of millions of niggling mosquitoes and midges: the mosquitoes carried malaria and the midges horse sickness. This caused the Boers to retreat back over the Magaliesberg to the cooler, higher, southern side where they founded Pretoria, the future capital of the country that would become South Africa.
Among all the things that could bite you there was one tiny insect – all but invisible to the human eye – that caused them the most problems. It was the pin-head size Cullicoides midge, which does not bite humans but does like horses. They are carriers of the Orbivirus that causes African horse sickness, a highly infectious and usually lethal equine ailment. Once symptoms show, very much like the symptoms of flu in humans, death usually comes in 24 hours if it is not detected and treated. These little nasties also like to bite zebras and suck their blood but the zebras seem to be immune.
African horse sickness was the curse of the Boers who were as dependent on horses as the Mongol hordes or knights of old had been. Horse sickness and the donderse rooinekke, the damned British, whose necks turned an angry shade of red in the fierce African sun. And dubbeltjies.
The British who ruled the Cape pretty much left the Boers alone in their two dinky republics, the Orange Free State and Transvaal Republiek, but only until diamonds were found in the former and then gold in the latter, by the potful. War was declared in October of 1899 and the military brass in London boasted it would be over by Christmas. And it was: three brutal Christmases later.
In the ensuing fracas, the army of the mightiest empire that has yet existed had its nose seriously bloodied by two tiny nations of scruffy farmers. When all was tallied the war ledgers noted:
British forces: 500 000. Died – 21 000 plus 934 “vanished”.
Boer forces: 50 000. Died – 9 000, captured – 24 000.
British Empire 1, Boer republics 0.
What they did not show, but what was drummed into every Afrikaner child for a century thereafter were the following statistics:
Boer women and children interred: 100 000, died 30 000.
They had been herded into unsanitary concentration camps and died of typhoid and measles, dysentery and malnutrition. It was not to be forgotten.
What the ledgers of both sides did not reveal were the deaths of black bystanders. If they were caught helping the Boers, the British shot them. If the Boers found them siding with the Brits, blam! Many farm and domestic workers were shoved into the concentration camps alongside their Boer “madams”, but no one bothered to keep a tally of their numbers.
The animals fared even worse. The number of horses killed during the Anglo-Boer War was unprecedented at that time, even more than during the Crimean War when brave men and fools might at any moment make cavalry charges into the maw of blazing cannons. The life expectancy of a horse during the Boer War was just two weeks, similar to that of a foot soldier in the First World War. Around 520 000 horses were shipped to South Africa by the British army. An estimated 300 000 died.
During the Boer siege of Mafikeng, once normal rations had been used up, horses were served up at the finest tables in town. The ever-resourceful Lt-General, later Lord, Baden-Powell had the horse remains boiled down to a jelly that was called Chevril and would be added to boiling water as a savoury tea, the forerunner of Bovril. In between ducking Boer sniper fire, the lads he’d organised into a signals corps would deliver “tea” around town every afternoon at four.
That was the beginning of the Boy Scout movement with its wolf-pack symbolism, which was informed by the writings of Rudyard Kipling. Powel, Kipling and Cecil John Rhodes were members of a cabal of true believers that held that English gentlemen, preferably ones from Oxford or Sandhurst, had been ordained through processes natural and divine, to rule the lesser beings of the earth.
“Dyb dyb dyb, Akela, we will do our best.”
No figures are to be found for what fate befell the 106 000 mules and 151 000 donkeys that did service, but you can imagine they were first into the Chevril pots. Most of the horses on both the British and Boers sides are now believed to have died from African horse sickness.
When it emerged from the rubble, the Transvaal government decided to tackle the sickness that might well have lost them the war. They put up a £1-million reward for anyone who could find a cure. No one has yet stepped forward to claim the cash, but one man at least might have claimed a share. His name was Arnold Theiler, to which a Sir was later affixed.
Baby Arnold was born in Switzerland where he grew up to study medicine. In 1891 he packed a few medical books, a microscope and his surgical instruments into a bag and took a ship to Cape Town. From there he ventured northwards, travelling by train to Kimberley and from there by mail coach to Pretoria where he arrived just as war clouds were gathering.
He might have regretted it later for a small loss he incurred there, but he took a job on the farm Irene (later home of Jan Smuts). While overseeing the welfare of the farm’s draught animals, young Theiler (pronounced Tiler) had his left hand diced up in a chaff cutter. He was not a man to let one missing appendage get in the way of success. Two years later he developed a vaccine to combat an outbreak of smallpox on the Witwatersrand goldfields.
That brought him to the attention of the government in Pretoria. One smart move the fundamentalist bearded President Kruger made, when war against the Brits was declared, was to appoint Theiler as government bacteriologist. The pay-off was almost immediate when Theiler’s team developed a vaccine against rinderpest, or cattle plague, that had wiped clean the fortunes of many a Boer farmer before and since. Suddenly he was a local hero.
At the outbreak of peace in 1902, Theiler was persuaded to focus his microscope on the other great scourge of the region, African horse sickness, or in the lingo of the veterinary trade, AHS. The site he chose for his work was the patch of swampy grassland alongside the Apies River, lying directly north of the onderste poort.
“The place was rotten with horse sickness,” according to a later head of equine research there, “so it was the obvious place for him to set up shop.”
In time, Theiler became director of the research and teaching institute that was named Onderstepoort, which grew up around the swamp that became the Bon Accord Dam. One of his daughters became a teacher, the other a professor of parasitology. One son worked at Onderstepoort while the other, Max, was awarded a Nobel Prize in physiology and medicine in 1951.
In the mid-1990s, Onderstepoort Biological Products’ commercial division received a call from the National Institute for Communicable Diseases, asking if they had any snake serum available. The NICD had been called by someone at the South African Medical Research Centre in Johannesburg, who had taken a call from a hospital somewhere up north, asking if they could help with someone who’d been bitten by a big black snake and was in a coma.
In the chain of events that followed, no one remembers what happened to the original snakebite victim. But Onderstepoort set up a snake-bite serum programme. Its working farm Karl Plaas had horses to herd the cattle and they were ideal subjects to produce vaccines in industrial quantities. The usual band of horse traders was called and that was how Zulu and his Bergsig homies came to join the programme.
Zulu was one of around 50 horses of all shapes, sizes and colours assembled to test snake-bite serums at the famous institute. If you were bitten by a black or a green mamba, a boomslang or – heaven help you – a vine snake, chances were you’d be given a vaccine that had come courtesy of one of this noble band of equine brothers.
To make snake antivenin you need two things to start and Onderstepoort had plenty of the first, horses. But they did not have snakes, even though snakes are little different from any other vertebrate type, horse, whale or human: a central spine with four radiating limbs – even if outwardly they might appear to be very different. Whales have small floating bones where their back legs should be, and even some snakes (such as pythons) have vestigial leg bones. Some lizards have diminutive legs, some front legs only, while others are legless. But neither horses nor whales have large fangs or lightning reflexes.
The veterinary staff and students were generally not adept at handling poisonous snakes. Extracting snake venom, called milking, is not a thing to do without proper supervision. The people best trained to deal with them worked not far away at the Transvaal Snake Park in Halfway House (now Midrand), an acre of writhing, slithering reptilian heaven for those who like that kind of thing. There are three basic kinds of snake venom: neurotoxin from the cobra family (including mambas) that attacks the central nervous system; cytotoxin from mainly adders and vipers that causes tissue decay; and haemotoxin from a small group of snakes including boomslangs and vine, or bird, or twig snakes, which thins the blood and causes fatal bleeding if not treated timeously.
Until fairly recently, serious snake bites were treated quite crudely. If you were bitten by a puff adder (the most frequent perpetrator) you would be pumped full of cytotoxin antivenin. The first challenge is that you need to be absolutely sure what species of snake bit you. Then you want to be sure it has injected a dangerous dose of poison because if it has not, and you get pumped full of serum, it could be worse than the bite.
If you were bitten by a berg adder (albeit a rare likelihood) and you were administered with cytotoxic serum, you would be in serious trouble since these little vipers have predominantly neurotoxin and you’d get a double whammy. Many snakes, in fact, have a cocktail of poisons. So the thinking these days is to treat snake bites symptomatically. For example, most deaths from neurotoxic bites are a result of asphyxiation. The victim’s nervous system goes haywire, their internal and external intercostal muscles go into seizure so the lungs no longer pump air in and out, and the person dies from lack of oxygen reaching the brain. Keep them breathing artificially until the poison runs its course and you have a better than even chance of saving them.
But how do you make snake antivenin? Much like Theiler did for the miners on the rand, or Edward Jenner for smallpox victims of Gloucestershire back in the late 18th century. Inoculation had been around for a very long time before Jenner got to work and in truth he had been inoculated against the pox as a child.
King Mithridates of ancient Pontus (now in Turkey) is reputed to have ingested small quantities of poison in order to develop immunity. The esoteric English transitive verb, to mithridatise, means to become immune to something by taking gradually increasing amounts.
Europeans had learned the trick from the Ottomans (Turks) who had learned it from the Circassians who lived around the Black Sea until they were displaced during the Russian-Circassian War of 1864. By that time scientific work on inoculation was progressing apace in both Britain and France, but it was Jenner who took those ideas out of the laboratory and into the field of mass vaccination.
The idea that a little dose of poison can be a good thing had been around for a long time. If you are careful and don’t kill the patient, you might kill the disease. As in the use of arsenic to cure syphilis until not so long ago, Jenner, a country doctor, noted that milkmaids infected with relatively benign cowpox did not seem to contract deadly smallpox. He reckoned that pus in the blisters milkmaids got on the job protected them. Jenner took some pus from a milkmaid named Sarah Nelmes in his village of Berkeley and injected it into the arm of eight-year-old James Phillips, the son of his gardener. Young James developed a fever but no serious infection.
Jenner’s next step was the truly brave one – more for James than Jenner in truth: “Sit on this stool here and trust me, I’m a doctor.” Jenner injected the lad with smallpox … but James did not react. The rest is history, excepting for those feloniously misguided people in these supposedly better informed times who think inoculation against deadly diseases is a bad idea. But then you cannot argue with drunks, fools or true believers.
Jenner further postulated that cowpox came originally from a disease in horses then known as “the grease”, so horses might be the ideal partners in the business of producing smallpox vaccinations. But back to snakes and how to milk them (carefully mostly).
In order to create industrial quantities of serum you need to start with lots of horses and a similarly large amount of snake venom, which entails milking a lot of serpents. First you take a black mamba, boomslang or gaboon viper (the three most lethal specimens of their kinds). Then you take a glass or plastic receptacle over which a latex membrane has been stretched. You hold your snake firmly behind the head – this is important – which causes their fangs to project. Pierce the membrane with the fangs and then massage the venom glands that are located below and behind the eyes. The venom thus extracted is dried (freeze-dried these days) and then handled with great care in order to avoid inhalation.
What they did at Onderstepoort is pretty much how it was first done by Albert Calmette, a French doctor working in Vietnam in the 1890s. Following a spate of cobra bites in the wake of a flood in Saigon when 40 of his patients died, he milked monocled cobras and injected judicious amounts into horses he had rounded up for the task. After allowing time for antibodies to be produced (following the published works of people like Edward Jenner and Louis Pasteur), he drew blood from the horses and made a serum, which he then used with great success on snake-bite victims (presumably cobra ones).
The stable building at Onderstepoort was bare red brick with a green corrugated-iron roof. The heavy timber rafters were exposed but the roof had a quaint roof lantern, a raised structure that ran the length of the central spine, which allowed light and fresh air to flood into what would otherwise have been a gloomy barn. The horses had soon relaxed into the daily routine of Karl Plaas, being well – if cavalierly – looked after by the grooms.
Weekdays were workdays, with a precise schedule. It was a routine of needles: sedation, envenomation, waiting, blood extraction. It takes months for a new horse to start producing usable antibodies as they are slowly introduced to the various snake poisons. Some horses were given only one kind, some two, others as many as possible, and the resulting blood samples carefully monitored. Zulu seemed to be one of the more resilient subjects of the programme, so he was one of a small group of extra-special horses that was put on the tough “liquorice allsorts” poison plan. Tommy, once gelded, was another. Sturdy in both body and temperament.
Weekends were free for the horses that had not been recently envenomed and were being monitored, and they ran untethered in the fields during the day. In summer they had to be back indoors before sunset when disease-carrying biting insects became active; in winter, before frost.
The feed store was located at one end of the stables, always full of oats and lucerne to supplement their grazing along with bags of commercial feed supplement pellets. Without a ceiling, when warmed by the sun, a smell of baking bread would overlay the sweet-sour stable scents.
The tack room alongside had the smell of leather, sweat and Dubbin, “redolent of cigar smoke and Shiraz” an epicure might pontificate. There was a barn for tractors and cutters and a store for general maintenance and cleaning paraphernalia. Beyond that were rather Spartan lodgings for the black staff. On Sunday mornings the horses knew the drill: the volume and duration of the noise coming from the staff quarters the previous night would determine the time they would be fed and let out of the stables.
The exception was when the groom Oupa (an odd name to give a baby) was on duty; his father, Nimrod, had worked for Professor Theiler, founder of the institute. His grandfather, Obed, had apparently marched his son, Oupa’s father Nimrod, up to the door of the institute’s double oak entrance, knocked, insisted on speaking to “die baas” and stated simply that the boy was ready to start work immediately. The reticent first director of Onderstepoort just smiled and shook on it.
Oupa did not party on Saturday nights, being a paid-up member of the teetotalling ZCC church, but he did love to dance. When Radio Bantu was turned to full volume he could not help but leap up and join in for a while, stomping to appreciative clapping in time to the African township beat in his heavy car-tyre-sole shoes.
He displayed the obligatory silver star on a black felt swatch, worn proudly on his black military-style cap. When Oupa was on Sunday morning duty things ran like clockwork. Oupa’s son, Mpho Maponyane, called Maps, was a graduate of the Pretoria Technikon’s animal science department and later worked with Onderstepoort’s head of Equine Research Alec Gurney on his pet project, documenting the bloodlines of the country’s thoroughbred stock. The other 75 per cent of their time was taken up dealing with African horse sickness.
In front of the old Edwardian building where the institute began, now sadly neglected in an administrative back yard of the campus, stands a statue of Arnold Theiler. Actually he is seated and he has both hands firmly attached.