The Story of the African Dog

A few days ago I was woken by my girlfrind, Ellen, looking in a state of shock. 'The puppy has been run over and your car is a write-off', she said. It took a few minutes to absorb, although the story was fairly straightforward. Our youngest son, on sabbatical from university, had taken our two dogs for a Sunday morning walk. The youngest - still something of a puppy - had bolted across the road and, as happens with these things, had been hit by the only car in sight.

Our son, thinking the animal could be saved if he could get it to the vets' in time, put it on the passenger seat of my car and accelerated away, into a lamp post. Fortunately he had automatically put on the safety belt and so had not been injured himself. The dog looked unmarked, but her skull was broken.

Many tears were shed as we buried her. Her name was Alex - named after Alexandra Township where the SPCA had found her. She was what used to be known - before the adjective became so offensive as to be virtually unusable - as a "kaffir dog". It was identified with the townships and was considered by people who did not live in the townships to be little more than vermin - a skulking pariah, usually found in the vicinity of garbage dumps. Ellen had chosen her and, being from Europe, I guess she was not sensitive to the pariah status of such animals.

In the short time we had her it became apparent that she had many positive attributes. For one thing she had extraordinary speed, running with that gloriously flowing motion of a cheetah, or a grey-hound. Her bat-like ears were constantly pricked and seemingly attentive. Her coat - short, hard and yellowish - seemed designed for the highveld. In fact we realised as we mourned that - apart from a peverse taste she had shown for books, eating the first-edition copy of Memoirs of Hadrian which I had been reading - the dog had been purpose-built. She was a dog which designed by natural selection for Africa - as opposed to the cosmetic engineering by which the Kennel Club has foisted genetic aberrations on the public for more than a century.

By an extraordinary coincidence I wandered into a suburban bookshop on the night Alex was killed and picked up, from a pile of volumes awaiting re-sorting, one devoted entirely to the subject - 'The Story of the African Dog' (University of Natal Press) written by a former Belgian paratrooper, Johan Gallant. The book, as Gallant explains in an introduction, is his attempt to right an "injustice" done to "the so-called outcast dogs of South Africa, the dogs which are traditionally associated with rural African communities and which have been spurned and disregarded by Western prejudice as the worst kind of disease-ridden mongrels."

Gallant points out that dogs have been around in Africa for a long time. When the Portuguese arrived in South Africa in the 15th Century they found that the San, or Bushmen people and the Hottentots living in the Cape already had their own dogs. The earliest remains of a dog to be found in Southern Africa are dated to 570 AD and Gallant reckons that on the continent as a whole they go back at least 7,000 years.

Which suggests the 'pariah' dog - 'Africanis' as Gallant calls them - have had plenty of time to develop a genetic heritage well suited to local conditions. It is a point which right wing Afrikanerdom would have done well to take on board in the latter stages of apartheid rule when they obsessively tried to breed wolf-hybrids - only to end up with wolves wearing booties to protect them from Africa's harsh terrain.

Loyalty is also said to be an attribute of the African dog. Or at least that is the theme of a memorable short story about such a dog told by Herman Charles Bosman, South Africa's Maupassant, or O.Henry. The story, told by one "Stoffel Oosthuizen, was of the early days in the Transvaal and a skirmish between a group of black warriors and some Boers on commando. One of the warriors killed a member of the commando and stripped him of his clothes, to the excitement of 'a yellow kaffir dog' which was yelping around his black master. The warrior was himself then killed, by a final shot from the commando.

Months later the Boers returned to the scene of the skirmish to give their fallen comrade a proper burial. The task was more difficult than they had anticipated, because his flesh had been blackened by the sun and the bones scattered by wild animals. But the task was eventually completed and the dead man buried in a small cemetery on his nearby farm, under a sandstone memorial.

Riding past the graveyard on a clear and starry night, Stoffel Oosthuizen saw something leap up from the mound beside the sandstone slab.

'It gave him quite a turn, Stoffel Oosthuisen said, for the third time - and in that way - to come across that yellow kaffir dog'.