AT THE TIME WHEN THE Bergsig horses arrived at Onderstepoort for the snake serum project, Ruff Stevens was a senior lecturer in equine sciences at the Pretoria Technikon. His job was, at least partly, to give his students a working knowledge of the animals. Each Wednesday afternoon they would board a bus and drive from the city northwards over the poort to the pastures beyond to get some real hands-on experience at Onderstepoort, a real veterinary school which at that time was the haunt of only white students. Although the old “net blankes/whites only” sign had been removed, it would take some years yet before internal structures of the old apartheid system would begin to crack.
The tech students were all black and their bantu education had hardly equipped them for institutions of superior learning. Most of them had grown up in the townships, dark alter egos of each white town. They would not have had riding lessons let alone their own ponies. The first week of the course was weeding time where their tutor was expected to sort out the vets from the wets. Those with clearly no affinity for horses were smelled out: each student was expected to know the front from the back and what to do at each end.
On the students’ first day at Karl Plaas, Ruff would lead one of the better-natured horses out from the stables to where the young people were gathered. It tended to be Tommy or one of the Boereperds, never any of the unpredictable Namibian stock. He tolerated Zulu but was not impressed with the black horse’s hoof defect he’d detected. The prospective students were as nervous of their lecturer as they were of the horses. Ruff always wore jeans, a khaki or checked shirt with a sleeveless leather singlet and a stockman’s hat. In his riding boots he stood around six foot six, staring down onto, as well as simply staring down the students. His name there was the Cowboy; he looked like one and he acted like one.
“A horse is an animal with two ends,” he would begin. “Both are equally dangerous.” It was supposed to raise a laugh but the students, facing a white giant of a lecturer for the first time in their lives, were too intimidated to react. It was 1995 and democracy in South Africa was only a year old, so these were not yet the black “born frees” who would later enjoy the fruits of freedom and privilege.
Still, they were among the intellectual elite of their generation. First the new arrivals would learn basic horse sense, concentrating on the head and mouth, and then the legs. How a horse’s lower leg, anatomically, is really a foot. They would learn about the need for grooming, checking hooves and regular farrier work, how to do basic medical examinations, how to walk a horse, basic schooling and, then, how to ride.
Pretty much everything had to be taught from scratch. How to mount, how to hold the reins, how not to hurt the horse’s mouth.
“You must not pull the reins up,” Ruff demonstrated. “A horse cannot go up, off the ground,” and he jumped comically. By this stage he might get a laugh or two.
“Keep your hands down,” he demonstrated. “Pull back, into your guts, to stop. Pull sideways … no, keep those hands down, in your lap, now pull – gently – one side or the other.”
Riding with one hand would come later, as would using a loose rein rather than pulling on the bit. The best would get to enjoy the freedom and joys of riding bareback, some even without reins, Indian style.
“As soon as you touch those reins you are sending messages to the horse. Then it will send you messages back. You need to be aware of them and know what it is expecting you to do next. The horse is learning what kind of person you are by the way you ride.”
That was a revelation because, for most, their most intimate interactions with animals up to that point would have been throwing stones at township mongrels.
Slowly their riding was nuanced. Balancing, learning how to trot in order to save theirs and the horse’s backs, in sync with the rising and sitting.
“It’s called rising to the trot,” the lecturer explained. “Each horse has its own pace and rhythm, but each conforms to the same count, one-two up, one-two down. Try to get the beat right. You should all know about the beat!”
Ruff was born in Zimbabwe when the country was still known as Rhodesia – a pivotal red piece in the African puzzle that Cecil John Rhodes had dreamed of fitting into a colonial fiefdom. They, Ruff and his kind, still called themselves Rhodesians while others knew them as “when wes”. Even 20 years of civil war had not dimmed their belief that they had been born to rule the darker masses of Africa. They sought out their own kind to drink and reminisce about when we did this and when we did that.
Ruff watched each student closely. Their posture, their rhythm, timid or confident, jerky or smooth, bully or ally. How they handled the enormous and unexpected power in a horse’s body.
Back at the stable yard he would demonstrate: “Horses can’t talk, you know. You are supposed to be the intelligent species, so use it!”
Stones or thorns could get stuck under the hooves, burrs in manes and tails – “a tail is a horse’s limb for reaching hard-to-get-to places, so it needs to be kept in good condition”.
“Flies and miggies love their eyes, and that drives a horse crazy. Always make sure they are clear of muck.
“Horses have soft soles inside the outer hoof wall, look closely,” he explained to the crowd, picking up a hoof and pushing on the spongy tissue. “The outer wall, which we think of as the hoof, needs to be kept at an even length all the way around the sole.
“Some of you, at least those of you who graduate, are likely to work in the townships or on farms where you see this kind of thing, and worse. You might be the only professional they ever get to see, so do it right.
“Be careful when scraping the sole and always use a hoof pick, never a knife or any piece of metal that comes to hand. How would you like someone to scrape a wound on the sole of your foot with a piece of rusty iron?”
They laughed but got the point.
“The back of the hoof, this triangular bit,” he pointed out, “is called the frog. It is soft and needs to be protected by the surrounding hoof. Each hoof is different and needs to be shod differently. That’s why farriers have jobs. As vets you’ll have to check when a horse needs a manicure because they walk and run on their toenails. They can also get ingrown nails, just like us.” A few sniggers.
“Basically, you are looking for …” he picked up the demonstration horse’s front hoof. “Look at the bars on either side of the frog, these are very pronounced. See how I can lift them with my finger. It’s not a deformity, some horses just have large ones.”
A ripple of giggling moved through the group but the lecturer was not privy to the joke about “some men”.
“And look out for fungal growth,” he told them. “You’ll get to see lots of that where animals are kept in dirty conditions. You’d be surprised how many people walk around with huge fungal growths between their toes ….”
“Ugh!” in unison.
“Horses cannot clean their own feet so we have to do it for them. And look out for abscesses and cracks.”
“How do you tell an abscess?” It was the first time a question was asked, clearly the students’ confidence was building.
“You look for any spot that just does not look right, does not have a matching spot on the other side. They are usually darker and they look sore. A healthy hoof looks healthy, and if it doesn’t it usually isn’t. It is common sense, but you find out that common sense is actually not so very common. We have to learn it.”
Ruff sent one of the students to fetch Zulu from his stall. He was led out to the brick-paved yard.
“Look closely at the hooves, can you see anything different?”
No response. Everything looked peachy.
“He’s got one box foot, can you tell which one? The front ones, look more carefully.” They looked more carefully.
“The right one, the hoof band is thicker than the others, can you see it? It is not necessarily a problem, but it can be. Some breeders consider it to be a deformity and if a foal is born with a box hoof they’ll put it down.”
“Why?” asked one female student.
“Because, one way or another, whether riding or pulling, every horse has to earn its keep. A horse that cannot work has no value.”
Ruff was the kind of person you would want by your side under fire or facing down an elephant charge, but his social graces could be lacking. He spared little sentiment for other humans. Also, although he knew his forelock from his fetlock, he did not think horses were intelligent beings.
“They let us ride them, for goodness sake. You have to show them who’s boss.”
His academic counterpart at Onderstepoort, Alec Gurney, was altogether more empathetic. Yes, he would agree, but they have a sneaky habit of making us want to go where they do. Gurney had observed that Zulu had taken his place as the natural leader at Karl Plaas and that, with mares being absent so as to avoid the fierce competition it aroused, there was very little real infighting among the herd of stallions and geldings.
“To keep things tidy,” as Gurney saw it, “you don’t want to spend your days sorting out horse relationships when what you are trying to do is keep things simple so you can do some real science.” Ruff also disliked things that weren’t neat and straight. He could see that Zulu was temperate and well-schooled, but he failed to understand why everyone else seemed to favour him.
“I only use him in classes to show the students the downside of horses,” he confided to Gurney. “He’d make a good riding horse, until he wouldn’t.”
The Onderstepoort man raised an eyebrow.
It was Ruff who first noticed that some of the horses in the stable at Karl Plaas had started cribbing. Fire seemed to be the worst. Horses are funny things and they seem to have a collective consciousness. You could call it a kind of mass hysteria. One starts doing something and the others follow. For no sooner had Fire started gnashing at his stable door than others followed suit.
“Got to ride them more,” Ruff told Gurney one Wednesday. The reality was that some horses were being ridden fairly regularly but others not at all and they were getting tetchy. Even though he was not directly involved in the place, Ruff took it upon himself to remedy the situation by scheduling extra riding lessons for his tech students. It sorted out the problem.
Some of the horses at Onderstepoort did not particularly like humans. They came from dubious backgrounds and were constantly being herded into crush pens where their ears and manes would be yanked, needles jabbed into their necks and flanks. They were known to kick, bite, stomp on feet, run, throw and even break the arm of a rough and careless student. They had come from anywhere and everywhere and were as a rule the consequence of anything from neglect to cruelty.
“From the rich and poor alike,” Gurney observed.
In other words, from families where the persistent daughter was given a foal for her birthday and had had to bring it up on her own, on only apples and unconditional love. That was never good for a horse. But it was far better than those that had come from the ghettos where the cart horses were treated no better than dogs.
The Stevens family farm was in the dry western area near Bulawayo, grassland bordering on arid Kalahari, where he had learned the ways of the wild in the company of his siblings and their black playmates, the descendants of Mzilikazi’s impis. As tots they played with clay oxen and wagons made of dolosse, cattle vertebrae. As soon as they could run they learned to make klei latte, green swatches with which to fling clay clods at one another. Next came sjamboks and cattle whips, which created intense competition as to who could crack one the loudest. But in true colonial tradition, as soon as they became of school-going age, white kids were rent from the company of their black brethren.
Like a Boer child of old, Ruff had learned to shoot a rifle and ride a horse before he had lost his milk teeth. He was a man of the bush more than a man of the town and he suffered the shortcomings of humans with far less tact than he did those of horses. Ruff was a natural horseman and before he had finished high school he was representing his country in junior events. But, as was the custom of the times, the day he finished school his military father asked him in the nicest possible way to pack his bags and get a life.
After obligatory military service, Ruff headed for England with a letter of recommendation. While working as a groom for Lord and Lady Nathan on their estate, Collyers Farm, near Lickfold in Sussex, he spent three years plying the medieval jousting circuits of Europe. Riding as the rebel knight Sir Ironhoe, with a boar’s head on his shield, he dented many an opponent’s shield and many a lady’s reputation. After-tournament parties resembled medieval banquets.
“We rode hard during the day, and even harder at night,” he later recalled with a chuckle.
During that time he earned a Master in Horsemanship and did a farrier’s apprenticeship. Zimbabwe under draconian President Mugabe offered him little, so he returned to South Africa and spent the next sojourn of his still young life as a meat bomb – as members of the elite maroon-bereted parachute battalion referred to themselves. To everyone else they were Parabats and you gave them respect and your seat in the canteen.
His first job once out of the military was at the Medical University of South Africa, Medunsa, a university restricted to black students under apartheid segregation, as a veterinarian farm manager. Like all institutions for black people at that time, Medunsa had minimal facilities, so they relied for much of their means on Onderstepoort. That was Ruff’s first encounter with the place, where the discriminatory whites-only students referred to him, his colleagues and their black students as me-dunces.
For the first three months, before he managed to squirrel away enough money for an iskoroskoro, a rattletrap, he would run to work and back home. Parabat training never went to waste. But a car gave him more freedom and it allowed him to take up eventing again, which would remain his real passion throughout his life. It was at a fundraiser event in Kyalami, a horsey heaven in the peri-urban fields north of Joburg, that he met Lois.
She was eye-turning gorgeous and she rendered him short of breath. She was tall and graceful, long dark brown hair … imagine the most beautiful tall, slim, smiling young woman you can and that was Lois. He followed her around the circuit and she seemed bemused by his attention.
“It was game, set and match on day one,” Ruff would later muse, “and we were married within a year.” She came with several hectares in Kyalami and a stable full of horses, some for eventing and some for her passion, Riding for the Disabled. Then, somewhat more bitterly, “It’s amazing when you see someone like that, to think that later you wish you’d never met them.”
A patina of bravado masked the scar tissue. What the relationship did for him, in a more profound way, was to moderate his chauvinistic ego and basically rescue him from sliding into a life of undiluted misogynism.
There was a side project at Medunsa that kept Ruff there way after his sell-by date. A Professor Boyzofel had his own Arab stud on the university grounds which brought in very good pocket money. In Ruff the senior academic acquired a silent partner and a stud manager of exceptional quality. However, when the call came from an old army connection who was kick-starting a department of equine sciences at the nearby Pretoria Technikon, Ruff jumped horses mid-stream. The next few years were spent doing very much the same thing, teaching black students how to be vets.
Late in 1996, Alec Gurney, having recently completed his PhD at Onderstepoort mapping the thoroughbred line in South Africa, received an unexpected visitor. It was Garth du Preez, the manager of Mashatu Game Reserve in the Tuli Block, just across the Limpopo in Botswana. The reserve had recently come under the directorship of a dynamic young team whose mission was to take Mashatu out of the sticks and put it on the international safari map.
At that time it could not compete with the more luxurious game lodges in places like the Sabi Sands or the Okavango Delta, so they decided to go for a different market. They were going to offer adventure safaris – walking, mountain biking and horse riding. The only problem was that no one there knew much about riding.
“Go and speak to the people at Onderstepoort,” MD Ewan Davidson barked down the phone line to his man on the ground, Du Preez. “I’ve heard they know a thing or two about horses.”
Gurney knew the game manager from his time doing a PhD on elephant population dynamics, the field work of which was done at Mashatu.
“I can tell you what parasites are in its blood,” Gurney told his visitor. “We’re just horse scientists here, doesn’t mean we ride the things. For that you need to speak to the Cowboy.”
“Where do I find him?”
“Here, but not today because it’s Tuesday. He’ll be here tomorrow, because it’s Wednesday.”
“If you can wait I can put you up at my place tonight, we can go out to the Dros for a couple of frosties and some slabs of cow. He works at the Tech and brings his students over each Wednesday to teach them about horses, but more generally to rough them up a bit, get some real African dust under their African skins.”
The last thing Gurney said to Du Preez on bidding him goodnight was: “Ruff was born on a horse. In the bush. So, from that point of view he’s your perfect man. But what he really is, is a loose cannon.”
“I guess you’d have to be to make a go of the horse safari thing,” said Du Preez to himself as he slid into alcohol-induced dreamland.
During that period Stevens was riding his mealie off and doing very well at three-day eventing. Life on the outside was good but work sucked. He had been with the Tech for several years but was getting nowhere professionally. The problem was that, not only was he an Engelsman, but also an uitlander, and the Afrikaners who ran things did not like either very much. They had not finished fighting the Boer War even as they were busy fighting the African War.
The call of the wild was already ringing loudly in his ears when Ruff took the weekend off to attend horse trials across the border in Gaborone, capital of Botswana, about four hours’ drive northwest of Pretoria. He won the event on the Sunday, narrowly beating an old army pal of his, Sluice Blewitt, so that night was a write-off. Gaborone nearly ran out of beer.
Arriving back at the office the next day he walked in late for the Monday morning faculty meeting. Immediately, as he sat down, the head of department, a dour, overweight bureaucrat, started picking on him. Ruff just absorbed it while the rest of the faculty kept a close watch, expecting an explosion at any moment.
But Ruff was writing something on an exam pad so the head man thought he was sucking it up and actually taking notes and, as bullies will, kept on nit-picking. No one really took any notice when he tore out the page and started folding it. Until he launched the paper aeroplane. There was complete silence as everyone watched it arc through the chilled atmosphere, land on the head’s desk, bounce once on his desk pad and come to rest right up against his belly. The man picked it up, opened it and read the short message, which said, “As of right now, I resign.”
“No, you can’t,” spluttered the enraged man. “You have to give a month’s notice.”
“Yes, I can. You have never seen fit to put me on permanent staff so I only have to give you one day’s notice. That’s it,” he said, pointing to his airmail delivery.
Ruff stood up with a brass band blaring in his head but acting completely calmly and in a measured voice said: “Please arrange to have my pension and outstanding leave pay ready for me to collect next week Monday.”
Then he turned on his boot heels and the Cowboy left the building.
As he drove back home all the weight of the world seemed to lift. He found his wife at the paddock, where he knew she would be, and shouted as he approached.
“Looks like we’re going into the horse safari business sweetheart.”
“Who’s we, Pale Face?” she asked, as she kissed him.
The pay-out amounted to R75 000, a small fortune back then. There followed weeks of phone calls back and forth between Kyalami and the Tuli and within a week the urban cowboy was well on his way to becoming a bush cowboy. The biggest dollop of luck was learning that the partners in the snake serum project had come to an impasse and Onderstepoort would be selling off horses from Karl Plaas. Alec Gurney said Ruff could have first choice.
Then Ruff went shopping. He bought an old army Bedford truck and a horse trailer and started his rounds searching for affordable stock and tack. Tight as he was by nature, the one thing he did not skimp on was saddles. He bought 20 new Australian stock saddles from Trident Saddlery located near the Turffontein Racecourse for R1 000 each, more than he paid for all but one of his horses.
He bought coils of riempie, dried strips of leather that were the bush equivalent of duct tape, and punch pliers for leatherwork. For hoof care he bought double-sided hoof knives, farrier nails, nipper hoof cutters, to add to the bits and pieces of his own equipment. He even remembered bott knives for digging fly eggs out of horses’ legs.
Saddle racks and much besides would have to be made with newcut mopane poles and windfall leadwood logs on site. But he had to buy new numnahs and saddle blankets, head collars with fly masks (midges tended to bite around the ears and eyes), bridles, curry combs, tick grease, fly sprays, veterinary rubs and salves and gels and pastes. He had to buy reins, stirrup irons, stirrup leathers, halters, bits, bridle hooks and bridle bags. Stable forks and buckets.
When Lois found him rummaging around in her stables (they remained her stables), she gave him a proprietorial dressing down. So off he went again in search of hay nets and feed bags, feed trays, feed scoops and poop scoops, hay forks and mucking shovels. The rest of the horse katunda he would have to buy, beg or borrow, while for building tools and materials he would have to rely on the stores and goodwill of Mashatu.
By the end of that two-week spree his stash was noticeably lighter and he still did not own a single horse of his own.