History of the Africaner Kennel

The Africaner Kennel was founded in 1995 when the Kennel Club granted John and Cheryl Mackfall the kennel affix of Africaner. 

 

The reason we chose the name "Africaner" was due to a very old book about David Livingstone, the famous victorian explorer of Africa that we were reading at the time, which described a Chief of the Hottentots of South Africa who was called Africaner. He was the Chief of a tribe who were renowned for terrorising the borders, he later found Christianity and converted. At that period the Hottentots kept with them strange wild hunting dogs that had a ridge of hair down their backs. Later the Europeans bred from these dogs with their domesticated Hounds such as Great Danes and Mastiffs and others to end up with Rhodesian Ridgebacks as we know them today. 

 We have traced our Kennel pedigree lines back to the earliest Rhodesian Ridgebacks that were imported into England. One direct ancestor to our current Show Dog Tor was "Viking Leo of Avondale" who was born in June 1928 in South Africa and then brought to England to show by Captain G Miller at the kensington Dog show in 1933, where he won 1st prize in a special Open class for foriegn dogs. The owner of the Viking kennel was Vernon Brisley of South Africa, who's kennel started around 1920.

Viking Leo of Avondale April 1933

The original Rhodesian Ridgebacks in South Africa were not a clearly defined as those you see today. They commonly had white or black patches in their coats and were generally stockier and smaller than today, but the general shape of the body and of the head are still very similar.  The Kennel Club Standard for the Rhodesian Ridgeback was fixed in 1922.