L

ast year’s event was bigger and brassier than ever, attracting about 30 000 fans, socialites, members of local horseracing associations and politicians, yet the sport isn’t even a soft blip on the national radar. It is generally derided by sophisticates as a pastime for hick homesteaders in ill-fitting clothes, and because it features non-thoroughbred horses almost exclusively, there is ample opportunity for snobbery in a sport legendary for its class-consciousness.

Meetings like the one at Bajodini, though, are not only competitive events. They are cultural celebrations, demonstrations of social cap- ital and masculinity — and an acknowledgment that there are lineages of horses and men going back beyond living memory.

In the 1970s, times were so desperate that at one event a single chicken was the coveted first prize. At various stages in the history of the sport the landscape has been enlivened by comics and jesters, and, even today, it is not uncommon to see singing and dancing around a horse, a kind of praise poem to wish it good speed and good luck as it heads for the start and a day of racing. gaxali, which roughly translated means “don’t worry”.

Despite poor eyesight and failing hearing — “it’s at about 40%” — Bikitsha, 88, wouldn’t miss race days for the world. He is the sport’s unofficial oral historian, and without him the days of miracle and wonder would be long gone.

“I’ve caught Bikitsha out just once in all my conversations, his memory is so good,” says Craig Pa- terson, my escort for the day. Paterson is writing a doctoral thesis on the history of traditional racing at Rhodes University.

“I asked him when the race at Qumbu started and he thought about it before saying it was 1946 — the year after World War 2. Actually it was 1919, the year after the Great War, and in all our many conversations it’s been his only lapse,” says Paterson.