High above the eastern Ethiopian city of Harar, on the slopes of Mount Kundudo, a small population of horses has survived in extraordinary isolation.They are known as the Kundudo horses, a rare, feral population that has become one of Ethiopia’s most enigmatic horse stories.
Unlike the horses seen at Ethiopia’s markets, festivals and rural settlements, the Kundudo horses have lived largely beyond human control. They move across the mountain’s grasslands, breeding without the intervention of a formal breeding programme and surviving in a landscape increasingly shaped by human settlement and agriculture.
There are very few of them and much about where they came from remains unknown.
A horse population apart
Mount Kundudo lies in eastern Ethiopia, near Harar, in a landscape of dramatic escarpments and highland grasslands. The mountain rises above the surrounding plains and has historically provided a relatively isolated refuge. It is here that the Kundudo horses persisted.Their isolation is central to their story. Unlike domestic horses, which have been deliberately bred and managed by people for centuries, these animals have existed with a degree of independence that makes them difficult to place neatly within Ethiopia’s domestic horse traditions.
They are generally described as feral rather than truly wild: their ancestors were domestic horses, but generations have lived outside direct human management and that distinction matters. The Kundudo horse is not a surviving prehistoric wild horse. It is something more complicated, a population of domestic ancestry that has, over generations, reclaimed a degree of freedom- a bit like the horses in Aus, Namibia.
A history written partly in memory
The origins of the Kundudo horses are the subject of both research and oral tradition.
One story connects them to horses brought to the region centuries ago, possibly during military campaigns in the sixteenth century. According to local accounts, horses may have escaped or been released onto the mountain, where they subsequently survived and reproduced.
It is a compelling story, but it remains a story.
There is currently no definitive evidence establishing the horses' origins in sixteenth-century military animals, and their history cannot be separated easily from the oral traditions that surround them, and this uncertainty is part of what makes Kundudo so fascinating. Their history exists somewhere between documented record, scientific investigation and collective memory.
For FARAS, that space between evidence and memory is important, Horse cultures are rarely preserved entirely in archives. They survive through people: through stories, practices, journeys, names and inherited knowledge.
Rediscovered
By the beginning of the twenty-first century, the Kundudo population had become extremely small.The horses were formally documented again in 2008, bringing renewed attention to a population that had largely disappeared from scientific awareness.
A survey in 2010 recorded only 18 horses. By 2013, that number had fallen to 11.
The population's extreme isolation has also raised concerns about genetic diversity and inbreeding. With so few animals remaining, the loss of even a small number of individuals can have profound consequences for the future of the population. The Kundudo horses therefore occupy an uncomfortable position: they are simultaneously a remarkable survival story and a population on the edge of disappearing.
What makes a Kundudo horse?
Physically, the Kundudo horses are not necessarily spectacular in the conventional sense, and that is part of their beauty.
They are generally small to medium-sized horses, adapted to the highland environment in which they live. Their appearance reflects the complicated ancestry of Ethiopian horses rather than fitting neatly into the visual language of a European breed,but a horse breed is never only a physical form.
The Kundudo horses belong to a particular mountain, a particular history and a particular body of Ethiopian knowledge, and to me, their identity is inseparable from place.
The mountain
There is something almost mythological about the idea of horses surviving on a mountain above Harar.
Below them is one of Ethiopia's oldest and most culturally significant cities. Around them is a landscape of farms, roads and expanding human settlement, and somewhere above it, on the mountain, a handful of horses continue to move through the grass.
The landscape itself has become part of their protection, but also part of their vulnerability. As surrounding land is increasingly used for agriculture and grazing, the horses' habitat becomes more restricted. Their small population makes them particularly susceptible to environmental change, disease and genetic problems.
The question is no longer simply where these horses came from, iIt is whether they will still be there for another generation to ask the question.
Wild, feral, or something in between?
The language surrounding the Kundudo horse is revealing.
They are sometimes referred to as Ethiopia's wild horses. Scientifically, however, feral is the more accurate description: horses descended from domesticated animals that now live independently of direct human management. Yet the distinction between wild and feral can feel inadequate when confronted with their history. For centuries, humans and horses have moved together across Africa. Horses have been traded, captured, bred, inherited, gifted and carried into battle. They have crossed borders and landscapes alongside people.
Sometimes they have escaped that relationship. Sometimes they have been deliberately left behind. Sometimes the story simply disappears.
A fragile future
The Kundudo horses are now recognised as one of Ethiopia's most threatened horse populations.
Their survival depends not only on the horses themselves, but on the preservation of the landscape in which they live and the knowledge surrounding them. Conservation is therefore more complicated than simply counting animals. It means understanding the mountain. It means listening to the communities who know it. It means documenting the horses before their numbers fall beyond recovery, it means intervention interms of welfare, care, feeding, medical treatment.
FARAS
The Kundudo horse is one of the reasons FARAS looks beyond the familiar images of African horses.
Across the continent, horses exist within extraordinarily different worlds: alongside warriors and farmers, in racing cultures and ceremonial traditions, in cities and remote landscapes, within deeply established breeding traditions and in populations that have survived almost entirely outside human control.
Kundudo is one of the most fragile parts, a handful of horses on a mountain, a history that has never been completely written.
And a question that becomes more urgent with every passing year: Will they survive?
POSTSCRIPT: Due to the current situation of unrest between Eritrea and Ethiopia our travels to Harar have been postponed until 2027.
Jess Henrich
