A new photo archive by Vintag.es shows that some of the European colonizers penetrating Africa in the 19th and early 20th centuries were riding wild zebras as an alternative to horses.
The reason behind it is the zebra's resistance to diseases carried by tsetse flies which made their domestication more attractive.
However, as many European colonizers learned in the early 20th century, despite their similarity to horses, zebras are just a bit too wild to completely tame.
Unlike horses, which naturally roam around munching on grass, zebras spend their lives cagily watching, evading and fighting savannah predators such as lions, cheetahs and crocodiles. Natural selection has bred zebras to be nervous, flighty and brutally aggressive if cornered.
But taming individual zebras to perform horse-like duties has occasionally been successful. Lord Walter Rothschild, for instance, trained a team of zebras to pull a carriage, which he drove past Buckingham Palace to demonstrate their supposedly pliable nature.
