Hi there r/askhistorians! I'm on a reading binge on the history of horses in Africa, and I'd like to know why there didn't seem to be a widespread adoption of horses by the Bantu/Swahili people of southern Africa.
As I understand it, horses were widespread among the North African civilisations, which were firmly in the Mediterranean sphere and therefore shared a lot of geographic and cultural similarities with southern Europe and the Middle East. Further to the south, horses also played a part in the military and cultural traditions of Sahel cultures like the Mali and Songhai empires, as well as some medieval Nigerian states. Looking at the map, it seems that the Congo Basin was the main barrier to the widespread adoption of horses: the jungle terrain appears to be thoroughly unsuitable for the animals, and I imagine that tropical diseases would've taken a grisly toll as well.
However, the terrain of southern Africa seems to be dominated by open, low-lying savanna - ideal ground for travel on horseback. It looks like there were a lot of opportunities to introduce horses to the region, too: the Swahili coast was historically an important trading hub with tons of exposure to the greater Indian Ocean sphere, and the Portuguese and Dutch surely must've brought some horses along when they colonised Angola and South Africa in the 16th-17th centuries. And finally, many groups in the region seem to have subsisted on cattle and goat-herding, like the Zulu, Xhosa and Khoisan. Looking through history, pastoral cultures across Europe and Asia were practically synonymous with horsemanship. Why didn't these groups integrate the horse into their lifestyle? This seems particularly jarring when contrasted with Plains Indians like the Comanche, who adopted the horse with great enthusiasm and went on to use them to dominate the Great Plains in the same time period.
I'd like to apologise if I've gotten any of the facts wrong, and would greatly appreciate any recommendation for reading materials re:horse cultures around the world. Thank you very much!
The primary problem with horse adoption in much of tropical and subtropical Africa, which Jim Webb in his Desert Frontier points out ably for the western Sahel, and which Sandra Swart's Riding High on the history of the horse in southern Africa extends, is that horses fall prey to a great many tropical diseases south of the Sahara and north of the Limpopo. In fact, this was so very much the case that the trade in horses--preferably Arabians--was a major moving part of the trade motor across the Sahara and even at times along the coast of West Africa. (We refer to a "horse-slave cycle" which is simplistic but captures key essentials.) They were superweapons of the Sahel and Sudan but needed to be replaced on a regular and costly basis that assured no wide adoption. Draught horses were unnecessary with disease-resistant oxen about, and zebra were never seen as necessary for domestication even were it possible.
I've never heard of any attempt to go to the interior of East Africa on horseback in the precolonial era, or of widespread use of such mounts, precisely because their maintenance and short lifespans posed a problem. The grasslands were ideal physically for the form of the horse--witness the other hoofed and herd mammals of similar form--but the heaviest breeds of horses themselves were not resistant to parasitic diseases. Only much later did breeds come into being that had some such resistance in West Africa (but the much larger, stronger Arabians were still preferred!) and of course in South Africa, once domesticated horses began coming in at the Cape of Good Hope, people very quickly took to them. Sotho, Koranna, Griqua, and Khoe horseback marksmen were fearsome enemies and, for some, essential allies; horses were widespread on the Highveld and the Karroo, though not as much on the coast, where broken terrain and heavy rains were not as kind to that mobility and they weren't so necessary anyhow given the higher carrying capacity of the land. However, north of the Kalahari and the Limpopo, horses ran into the same old problems and were extreme luxuries procured at great cost and trouble.
So really, the reason why has to do with ecology first and foremost.
In places where a niche developed for them and ecology permitted, horses were adopted and used very heavily by Africans, to the point that at times (such as the 1852 battle of Berea against Moshoeshoe, allied to the Boers) it was very possible for African horsemen to hold their own against colonial forces or even best them.
[edit: Berea in wrong year, oops]