Drakensberger

What do Drakensberger cattle look like?

Colour is the clearest marker of this breed: every animal is black, and that never varies. The frame runs from medium to large. A grown bull weighs between 900 and 1,100 kg, while a mature cow carries roughly 500 to 700 kg. At the withers, the ridge between the shoulder blades, she stands about 124 cm. In Eswatini, where the same cattle are also kept, they run distinctly lighter, with bulls near 654 kg and cows near 410 kg. In body plan the breed is chiefly taurine, that is of the European rather than the humped zebu sort, though its ancestry carries blood of Sanga cattle, the long-established African kind, and so it counts among the continent's mixed or composite breeds.

Where does the Drakensberger come from?

The breed took shape in the 1800s, its roots reaching back to the era of the Great Trek and perhaps before it. Settlers brought cattle out of the Netherlands and mated them with black cows of Sanga type belonging to the Khoikhoi, herders who moved from place to place with their animals. The crosses became known as the Vaderlander. War then cut Boer-owned cattle numbers badly: during the Second Boer War of 1899-1902, British forces destroyed livestock on a wide scale, and few animals came through. One line that survived belonged to Cornelis Uys, who late in the 1800s blended Vaderlander stock with Afrikander, Basuto and Nguni blood in a herd people called the Uysbees. Two further crossbred strains appeared early in the new century, the Kemp from Afrikander and Friesian parents, and the Tintern Black from Afrikander and Nguni. In 1947 all three were brought together as one breed, named for the escarpment where it was mostly kept.

What the Drakensberger is known for

Two aims guided the earliest breeders: a black coat, and the constitution to do well on sourveld, the veld grass that loses much of its feeding value once it matures. Selection of that kind produced a working animal shaped by hard country rather than by the show ring. The name comes from the Drakensberg escarpment, the tall line of high ground along which the cattle were chiefly kept in the breed's youth. Size runs medium to large, and the black coat is fixed across the whole breed.

How the Drakensberger is bred and kept

The Drakensberger Cattle Breeders' Society, set up in 1947, marks the breed's formal start; that same year the Uysbees, the Kemp and the Tintern Black were combined into one population. Registration has flowed steadily since: in 2006 about 5,500 new animals a year were being entered in South Africa, the sexes in near-equal shares. By 2008 there were 73 registered herds, all but two of them taking part in performance recording, a scheme that measures how each animal grows and breeds so that parents are chosen on measured results rather than on looks alone.

What the Drakensberger is kept for

This is a two-job breed. The cows are milked and their calves are reared for beef, which is what dual-purpose means in practice: an animal judged partly by what it yields in the pail and partly by how its young grow into meat. Rather than excelling in one direction, a dual-purpose kind is expected to give a fair return in each. The weight range fits that role, giving cows enough substance to raise a strong calf. In Eswatini the same double duty is carried out by distinctly lighter animals.

The land and climate of the Drakensberger

The environment these cattle were bred to suit is the sourveld biome, the grass country of South Africa whose grazing value falls away as the season ages, and their early home was the Drakensberg escarpment. From that base they now spread through nearly every province of the country, in a belt reaching from Humansdorp at the south-western end to Messina far away in the north-east. Herds also stand in Botswana, Eswatini, Lesotho and Namibia, and, since embryos were shipped over in 2006, a modest population has taken root in Australia.

Who keeps the Drakensberger

The Khoikhoi stand at the root of the story: nomadic herders whose black Sanga-type cows supplied the African side of the first cross. The Boers, farmers of Dutch descent in the interior, kept the European-derived herds that later fed the breed, though war cost them dearly; in the Second Boer War British troops killed livestock wholesale, and scattered survivors included the Uysbees herd of Cornelis Uys, a breeder of the late 1800s. His line, blended from several breeds, became a foundation of the Drakensberger. Today the animals are spread across the subcontinent in recorded herds, 73 of them registered in South Africa at the 2008 count.

Related breeds and crosses

The breed's family tree is crowded. The Vaderlander was the first cross-bred type, and the Uysbees of Cornelis Uys drew on it together with Afrikander, Basuto and Nguni blood. The Kemp came from mating Afrikander with Friesian, while the Tintern Black paired Afrikander with Nguni; both were absorbed when the breed was founded in 1947. Deeper back lie the Sanga cattle of the Khoikhoi and the Dutch imports, so the modern Drakensberger mixes African and European cattle throughout.

Numbers, conservation and the herd book

At the 2008 count the South African register held 13,355 head. By 2022 the breeding animals reported were 8,930 cows with some 2,660 bulls. World-wide the FAO rated the breed not at risk in 2007, yet DAD-IS placed the South African population in the vulnerable band of its at-risk list in 2023. The breed has also travelled: embryos shipped to Australia in 2006 founded a modest population there, and herds are kept in four neighbouring countries besides South Africa.

Questions people ask about Drakensberger

Good reading and sources

• Drakensberger on WikipediaEncyclopedia
• More photos on Wikimedia CommonsPhotos and video
• Wikidata recordOpen data