WHAT AFRICA MADE

The Damara sheep’s journey to Australia begins with none of the paperwork that eventually made it possible: no passport, no permit, no veterinary certificate. It begins in dust, in hoofprints strung day after day across a continent, in a coat pattern carried from mother to lamb for two thousand years, in the plain, stubborn fact of an animal that kept walking when almost everything around it did not.

Sheep are not native to Africa. Their arrival traces to a much greener Sahara some 7,500 years ago, when cattle and small stock were already widespread across what is now desert. Around 4,500 years ago, as the Sahara began to dry, pastoralist communities retreated south into West and East Africa, a migration that brought their animals into contact with new and often fatal threats, sleeping sickness carried by the tsetse fly chief among them. Sheep proved more adaptable than cattle, moving faster and further, through a narrow tsetse-free corridor running from the grasslands of southern Tanzania, through open highland grassland and the miombo woodland that still blankets much of Zambia and Zimbabwe today, and out onto the hard red sand of the Kalahari’s northern fringe in Botswana, where surface water can vanish for months at a stretch. It was less a route than a filter: whatever survived it was, by definition, tough enough to keep going.

Sheep reached the southern tip of the continent roughly 2,000 years ago. The evidence lies at Kasteelberg, on South Africa’s West Coast, where radiocarbon-dated bone fossils place sheep among the Khoi, an ancient people believed to have migrated from northern Botswana, bringing their sheep and their pottery with them. The San, hunter-gatherers sharing the same landscape, painted these animals on the rock shelters of the Cederberg Mountains; the paintings that survive show a fat-tailed sheep, the same defining trait the Damara still carries today. A 2021 study in Scientific Reports used palaeoproteomics, the analysis of ancient proteins, to confirm that a sheep phalanx from Spoegrivier, dated to 2105 BP (“before present,” the archaeological convention that counts backward from AD 1950, placing the bone at roughly 150 BCE), was indeed a domesticated sheep and not one of the similar-sized wild antelope with which such fragments are easily confused, the earliest directly dated evidence of a domesticated animal anywhere in southern Africa.

Sheep arrived in southern Africa in three distinct waves. The first brought the Afrikaner sheep, carried south by the Khoi around 2,000 years ago, the indigenous fat-tailed sheep later encountered by Dutch settlers at the Cape. The second arrived with Iron Age, Bantu-speaking farmers roughly 1,500 years ago, bringing with them the Pedi and Zulu sheep breeds, the latter now critically endangered. The third wave is the Damara, which reached the attention of European missionaries and explorers in the Kaokoveld of northern Namibia only in the nineteenth century, despite having walked the same long road south as the others. The keepers of those Kaokoveld flocks were the Himba, an Herero-speaking people among Africa’s most successful pastoralists, who arrived with Sanga cattle, goats, and Damara sheep, and built a way of life entirely organised around the seasonal movement of their herds.

The first Europeans to write any of it down did not yet have a settled name for what they were looking at. The English explorer William Burchell, travelling through what is now the Northern Cape and southern Botswana around 1820, recorded local tribes keeping sheep of “a particular variety having long thin tails,” leaner stock than the broad fat-tailed sheep prized further south. Three decades later the explorer Francis Galton, travelling among the Damara themselves, was struck by how deeply colour and provenance mattered to them, noting that they prayed over the graves of their parents for oxen and sheep, “fat ones, and of the right colour.” German colonial administrators exploring Namibia in 1904 divided the territory into named regions; the Kunene region, where this long-legged breed was found being reared by communal farmers, was named Gross Damaland. It was from this regional name, not from any single ethnic group, that the breed took the name Damara Sheep.

In 1954, a substantial number of Damara sheep were confiscated from commercial farmers caught smuggling animals through the Veterinary Cordon Fence, the Red Line erected to keep foot-and-mouth and lung sickness out of the disease-free zone to the south. Two names surface again and again in accounts of that smuggling era, Toy Maritz and Piet Grové. The confiscated flock was resettled at the Omatjenne Research Station near Otjiwarongo, where selective breeding over the following decades sharpened the Damara’s meat-producing qualities without stripping away its hardiness. When Rehuel Borstlap, then head of the station, led a small party into the remotest Kaokoveld in September 1967, what struck him was not weakness but condition: the flock was thriving on grazing so poor it seemed barely able to support them. Ninety per cent of the breed standards still in use today trace directly to that single trip.

A 2022 study published in the journal Biology added a striking new layer to this history. K. Ann Horsburgh and colleagues sequenced complete mitochondrial genomes from sheep excavated at Die Kelders 1, a cave site dated to roughly AD 630 to 857, and compared them against modern reference samples taken directly from Dawie du Toit’s own flock. Every one of the ancient Die Kelders sheep, and the majority of the modern ones, belonged to the same maternal genetic lineage, mitochondrial subhaplogroup B1. Several of the modern individuals clustered closely enough with the 1,500-year-old specimens that the study’s authors describe it as likely signalling a direct ancestor-descendant relationship: a living flock, carrying genetics essentially unbroken since before the fall of the Western Roman Empire.

The Damara’s other defining trait is its extraordinary variation in colour, a feature most sheep breeds bred for uniform white wool have long since lost. Geneticists who have examined the breed identify a specific architecture behind it, genes controlling solid black, tan, badgerface, black-and-tan and grey patterns, dark or light head against a contrasting body, and a uniquely African pattern breeders call “skilder.” Traditional African stockmen used colour and pattern for ceremonial purposes and to identify individual animals within a herd, and certain pigmentation patterns, dark skin beneath light hair in particular, offer genuine protection against intense solar radiation.

The traits that define the breed were not the product of a breeding programme. They were the product of survival: resistance to worms, flies and blowflies, high tolerance of most sheep diseases and parasites, and a flocking instinct that protects lambs by keeping the group tight. Long-term nutritional trials found the Damara draws as much as sixty per cent of its diet from browsing, leaves, twigs and woody shrubs, rather than grass, letting it thrive on country that would starve a more conventional grazer.

That hardiness has since made the Damara valuable to other breeders in a more direct way, as the genetic foundation of composite meat-sheep breeds developed in both South Africa and Australia, each chasing the same low-input, self-reliant qualities the pure Damara already carried for free. The warning attached is not a new one. In 1907 the German colonial writer Carl Schlettwein described the Damara’s cousin, the native cattle of Hereroland, as hardy and self-sufficient enough to survive like game “without the assistance of human beings,” in the very same book in which he urged farmers to cross-breed that hardiness away in the name of improvement. Within a generation, the indigenous cattle he had praised were gone, precisely the fate South Africa’s own indigenous Afrikaner sheep had already met a century earlier, in almost identical terms.

Two thousand years of survival, verified now by genetics as much as by memory, is not a footnote to this animal’s story. It is the story.