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raditional racing’s expanding horizons have brought different challenges. Madiba sees it as a sport on the cusp of growth, with fresh attention coming from local municipalities and small business. This growing interest was given added emphasis recently when the Eastern Cape government commissioned a report on the sport from Rhodes University. Paterson, who drafted it under the watchful eye of research office director Jaine Roberts, an ardent horse-lover, says he sees frequent signs that many of the report’s conclusions are being adopted.

“Every race I come to now I see a change,” he says. “It’s passing through an incredibly dynamic phase; it makes me really happy.”

But with the deepening interest come the wolves, the kick-back artists and the petty politicians. Both Madiba and Paterson see the vitality and new possibilities, but they worry about the effect of bureaucracy on the sport, and fear its lyricism and joy will be diminished. Still, interest of any kind might be preferable to the sport’s traditional place on the margins and its years of quiet suffering.

“What we are really, really looking for is for somebody to make us bigger,” says Madiba. “Written language is strong. The pen is much stronger than the eye.”

History doesn’t record whether the Moore family ever got their Christmas holiday, but Paterson tells me that Lawrence, the paterfamilias, was known in and around Qumbu as Notiki — a Xhosa reference to the tickey or threepence coin, presumably because a tickey could buy most things in those days. The sport certainly needs a contemporary Moore, a fixer or benefactor to lead it into fresh commercial pastures. The custodians of traditional racing, a dwindling constituency of geezers like Bikitsha and the slightly younger Madiba, are only getting older; scuffed but charming coins in a world awash with bright baubles and fresh R200 notes.