This Pathbreaking South African Horseman Hands a New Generation the Reins

Enos Mafokate was 16 when a punch in the face changed the course of his life.

It was 1960, and he was delivering milk for a dairy farm north of Johannesburg. It was the height of apartheid, and he knew the rules: He was to call his white employer baas—or boss—and the man’s teenage daughter kleinmiesies—the small madam.

But sometimes, when the boss wasn’t around, he called the girl by her first name. One day, he accidentally did it within earshot of her father. Before Mafokate even saw it coming, his boss’s meaty fist collided with his face. “His one hand was as big as two of mine,” Mafokate remembers.

One of Mafokate’s bright blue eyes swelled shut. While the girl sobbed, her father guiltily loaded him into his pickup truck and took him to a nearby clinic. Mafokate snuck out the back door and never went back to the job.

“If that punch never happened, I wouldn’t be here today,” says Mafokate, 80. He found his next gig caring for horses at a local stable, and from there he became one of South Africa’s first Black professional show jumpers. His decorated career, which included major show jumping victories in South Africa and the United Kingdom, spanned the final two decades of apartheid, a time when seeing a Black man dominate an old money colonial sport had a symbolism that extended far beyond sports.

“He tells us his stories when we need courage,” says Naledy Dlamini, 19, a student at Soweto Equestrian Center, the riding school Mafokate founded in 2007. She has been riding here since she was 8 years old, and like other students of Mafokate’s, she calls him ntate, the term for father in his native Sesotho. “He opened the way for us,” she says.