Nigerian polo player Neku Atawodi is excited about the future of polo in Africa and its ability to bring people together from all walks of life

Polo is fast becoming a popular sport for millennial women in Nigeria, and they are a common sight at the upscale Lagos Polo Club.
What was once an elite sport is now more accessible.olo is fast becoming a popular sport for millennial women in Nigeria, and they are a common sight at the upscale Lagos Polo Club.
It’s a far cry from the sport’s early years that completely banned women such as American polo pioneer Sue Sally Hale from playing in the 1950s.
Hale’s response was to disguise herself as a man by tucking her ash-colored hair under a helmet, flattening her breasts with tape and wearing loose-fitting men’s shirts and a moustache for nearly 20 years. She finally dispensed with the ruse in 1972 when the US Polo Association bowed to pressure and admitted her to its ranks. Her story reverberated all over the world and to Nigeria’s Benue State, where a young lady named Neku Atawodi was duly inspired to take up the sport.
Known popularly as Nigeria’s ‘polo queen’ and one of the few black women in the sport internationally, Atawodi is an equestrian for life.
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“I grew up in Kaduna and that is a very polo town. They are very influenced by horse-riding and durbars and so Kaduna had an affinity towards polo but also, my uncle lived next door and he had horses in his backyard. I remember watching polo events and falling in love with them when I was in junior secondary school. I loved everything from the horses to the players. I started riding with everyone,” she says.
With the riders maneuvering the magnificent horses under the mellow Nigerian sun, hooves kicking up dust, she fell in love with the ‘sport of kings’.
After taking a break from polo, during which time she got married, had a child and became the country director of the Meltwater Entrepreneurial School of Technology (MEST) training tech entrepreneurs, Atawodi returned to the sport in August for the United Kingdom’s first-ever Africa-dedicated polo event, the Lux Afrique Polo Day that celebrated the sport and the best of pan-African history and culture.
The event brought together leading polo players from across Africa to champion the rapidly-growing sport and provide a platform for young and emerging African talent to showcase their skills. For Atawodi, it was time to get back to the basics.
“It is really intense. After having a child, it is a lot of things you need to get back to like the gym and working on flexibility and endurance and then a lot of riding. I have to work a lot on my hand-to-eye coordination. I play a lot of tennis as well as do a lot of cardio,” says Atawodi.
Despite several infrastructural challenges playing the sport in Nigeria, including a lack of well-developed training programs encouraging people to enter the sport as well as limited fields to play on, Atawodi is excited about the future of the sport and its ability to bring people from all walks of life together.
“We are at a time where Africa is telling its own stories in so many different industries. So for it to also now come in things like polo, with different parts of Africa coming together to play the sport and showcase skills, is amazing. It fosters great strength and African unity and I am really looking forward to it,” says the African queen of the ‘sport of kings’.

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Meet ‘Nigeria’s Polo Queen’

About 81 kilometers from Africa’s richest square mile and the concrete jungle that is Sandton, we are on a gravel road that stretches as far as the eyes can see.
It’s a Wednesday afternoon and around us, on this stretch in the tiny town of Meyerton in South Africa, is nothing but dry earth and rolling vistas, until we come upon a signpost that says Rooijakkals Street – it’s an indication we are not lost.
Up further on the rocky road, in the distance, we see a horse. It’s the first tell-tale sign of our destination.
Past an open gate and another electric wired-fence with a gate, we approach the single-storied home of Scott Borland, an entrepreneur and professional farrier, in other words, a smith who shoes horses.
At the door, a lady, his wife, dressed in black, emerges, followed by at least a dozen dogs.
But we are here for the horses.
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Borland welcomes us – as we gingerly sidestep the scary canines – and shows us to the four horses in his stable. He says he has been looking after them ever since his children went overseas leaving them in his care.
Borland has been working from home for the last 15 to 20 years, he tries to recall, as we share a bench outside the stable not far from his work truck on the farm.
The gentle afternoon breeze fans his memories.
In 1981, he started his apprenticeship at the Newmarket Farrier School in Alberton, south of Johannesburg. The school shut down 15 years ago because there was suddenly a glut of farriers in the market and not enough jobs.
“I have been around horses all my life,” says Borland, “when I left school, it was a natural progression to move on to the horse industry and that’s how I took up my apprenticeship.”
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<div id="attachment_35947" style="width: 1034px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-35947" class="wp-image-35947 size-large" src="https://www.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Horseshoes-892-1024x683.jpg" alt="" width="1024" height="683" srcset="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Horseshoes-892-1024x683.jpg 1024w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Horseshoes-892-300x200.jpg 300w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Horseshoes-892-600x400.jpg 600w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Horseshoes-892-768x512.jpg 768w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Horseshoes-892.jpg 2048w" sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" />Borland demonstrates the process of shoeing a horse. Photo by Motlabana Monnakgotla.</div>
Horseshoes are metal-fabricated products attached to horse hooves to prevent hoof wear and injuries to the foot. The shoes keep the horses balanced and their feet maintained.
Professional farriers need to be skilled, so Borland has also trained apprentices, been on the South African farrier team representing the country in Canada, and has also shoed horses in Scotland, Turkey and America.
“Horseshoes are probably one of the things that changed the history of the planet,” Borland says grandly, going back in time to when horses were the prime mode of transport.
“There was a man called Henry Burden. He was a Scotsman who moved to New York before the start of the American Civil War, he was an engineer and developed the first machine to mass produce horseshoes in 1835. That machine can produce a shoe per second,” says Borland, with an intent look in his eyes.
He then references the Boer War in South Africa from 1899 to 1902. The reason the Boers used to blow up trains or hijack them were to steal horseshoes from the British, he says.
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“The horse industry had about 300 registered farriers in South Africa and a number of unregistered ones as well,” says Borland.
Today, it’s a specialized skill.
Horseshoes are made of different metals: steel – for work, aluminium – for performance, and plastic – for negotiating slippery surfaces.
Borland’s customers are mainly private clients who own horses for both pleasure riding and competition. He also shoes the horses used by the Johannesburg Metropolitan Police Department (JMPD) who have been his clients for the last 25 years.
Is it a lucrative profession to be in, I ask.
“A partner and I have recently started a horseshoe manufacturing plant on this very farm and it’s the only horseshoe manufacturing in the southern hemisphere; prior to that, all horseshoes were imported, so there isn’t really any revenue for the country out of it,” offers Borland; the only other countries producing horseshoes are India, China and Europe.
Borland and his partner started their business, Mustang Horse Shoes, in 2013, producing horseshoes locally and employing three people. They had to mostly learn by trial and error as there was no existing frame of reference for them in South Africa.
A fact they are proud of about the business is that they also sell their products in the coal yards based in the townships. This is where horses are used to pull carriages filled with coal, going street to street selling or delivering it.
<div id="attachment_35948" style="width: 310px" class="wp-caption alignright"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-35948" class="size-medium wp-image-35948" src="https://www.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Horseshoes-852-300x200.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="200" srcset="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Horseshoes-852-300x200.jpg 300w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Horseshoes-852-600x400.jpg 600w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Horseshoes-852-768x512.jpg 768w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Horseshoes-852-1024x683.jpg 1024w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Horseshoes-852.jpg 2048w" sizes="(max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" />In early times, Horseshoes were initially cast from iron and bronze, were synonymous with good fortune, and even used as talismans. Photo by Motlabana Monnakgotla.</div>
“Ninety percent of those shoes are our shoes. We make a very good shoe for their type of work. It’s a hard shoe and provides a lot of grip; most of these horses work on tar,” says Borland.
Mustang Horse Shoes uses rolled mild steel, produces its own plastic and will be using aluminium for its horseshoes.
The company services about 400 horses a month and makes a little over $8,000. The prices for shoeing horses range from $50 to $400 depending on the area and the type of horses they visit. Their business model is a mobile workshop, as they travel to the clients.
“We try to keep our traveling distance down to an 80km radius every day; we probably do 20 horses a day, depending on how far we are traveling,” says Borland.
I have never seen the process of shoeing a horse, except in the American cowboy movies I watched as a youngster, but Borland was surely able to throw more light on his unusual skill.
But now, each time I hear the clip-clop sounds of the JMPD horses, I know them to be of the horseshoes made by a humble farrier on a farm far from the sights and sounds of Johannesburg.
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Tag: Equestrian

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Meet ‘Nigeria’s Polo Queen’

The farrier who shoes horses for the Johannesburg Metropolitan Police Department