MC horse country beckoned

Much of Africa provides endless miles of sand, little water, severe sunlight and unrelenting winds. But despite the harsh conditions the continent’s Arabian horses are subjected to, Madison County resident Sara Loken has always found the animals to be the most pleasant companions.

“They are just so alive and have tremendous vitality,” the 82-year-old said while sipping coffee from a worn mug featuring a horse painting on the side.
Loken first became interested in the breed more than 40 years ago during an extremely challenging, and yet rewarding, several years she spent living in Africa.

In the early 1960s, Loken and her husband, the late Robert Loken – whom she had met while working at Time Inc.’s famed Life magazine – moved to Ghana, a country on the western coast of Africa.

The couple relocated when Robert Loken landed a job overseas with the Ford Foundation. At the time, the organization was working to provide support to former British colonies in Africa that had become “suddenly independent” and were “caught in the middle of the Cold War,” the Reva resident told The Eagle recently.

“One of the reasons we went was because JFK was so impressive to us,” she said of the couple’s decision to join the foundation’s effort, first moving to Ghana, and then Egypt, a few years later.

But the first few months living in Ghana – whose newly independent socialist government was rampant with corruption – were stressful and scary. Loken remembers body checks to visit the post office and hearing stories from friends about government officials kidnapping residents in the middle of the night and then dropping off a coffee tin filled with ashes to family members the next day.

In an effort to keep herself sane and entertained (English books and periodicals were almost non-existent), Loken – who has always enjoyed horseback riding – joined a polo team in Ghana made up mostly of British and European players, she said. The team used horses who had endured severe physical challenges – walking 3,000 miles from the North African deserts to sub-Saharan West Africa, and then competing at various racetracks until they were no longer favorable for racing.

“The ability, endurance, willingness, enthusiasm and charity of spirit of these stolid horses was in itself a philosophical lesson to anyone willing to be educated,” Loken wrote of her experience with the breed in a 1972 article published in the U.S. publication, The Arabian Horse News.

Following the couple’s move to Egypt three years later, her interest and regard for Arabians continued, but at first, it was from a distance. At the time, the cash-strapped government had confiscated many “profitable ventures,” including horses owned by private breeders, and many of the animals were then auctioned off and purchased by poor street merchants, according to Loken.

Many of the street vendors could barely feed themselves, let alone their newly purchased animals, which Loken regularly saw starving and struggling to carry an abundance of goods while walking the streets of Cairo, she said. But despite the suffering many horses endured, the country’s Muslim religious values forbade them from euthanizing horses, which are deemed the “beloved of God,” she said.

Loken’s push into action to help the situation came from her husband’s suggestion that she “get a horse, and get happy,” she said. Loken agreed, insisting that she would only purchase one, if she could bring it back to the U.S. when they returned home – a plan that later proved to be exceedingly difficult.

Through numerous talks with local trainers and breeders, the couple eventually purchased three Arabian horses named “Talal,” “Fakher El Din,” and “Hamdan,” who had been a horse owned by Egypt’s former King Farouk, who was forced out of power and exiled to Italy.

With the help of her husband, Loken also approached the Egyptian government with a plan for officials to acquire the emaciated purebred horses and train them as “dancing” horse performers that would serve as a tourist attraction and a means for extra income to boost the economy.

In 1967, once war broke out in Egypt with Israel, the Lokens had planned to return to the U.S. and had arranged for their horses to be transported by ship out of the Suez Canal. But by the time they were ready to leave, there was no way to get the horses to the port as wagons and other forms of transportation had been confiscated for use in the war. It seemed Loken may not achieve her wish to return back home with her beloved horses, and she had instructed local friends to shoot the animals if they were not successfully placed on the ship, for fear of the poor treatment and suffering they would likely endure if left in Egypt without her, she said.

Fortunately for the couple, a Cairo branch of the equine welfare charity now known as The Brooke came to the rescue. The hospital offered use of its horse ambulance – the only one in Egypt at the time – and was able to successfully transport the horses to the ship, allowing them to bring back some of the most “outstanding pedigrees” to the states, Loken said.

Once back in the U.S., the horses were kept in California and Tennessee while the couple spent a few years in New York City before moving down to Virginia with some of the horses’ offspring. Loken had worked with state equine extension agents and soil and water conservation district representatives to find the piece of land she purchased in the Madison County portion of Reva in 1976.

“I wanted good land for the horses and I wanted good land because I wanted good land. When you get down to it, that’s important,” she said.

Although Loken raised and bred several horses on her property for years, they all eventually died, apparently due to pesticides applied to a nearby property in the mid-1980s, she said. She ended up burying 17 horses on her Reva property – one area where the last five were buried stands out on a noticeably greener patch of grass seen from her living room window. Around the time she lost her horses, she also lost her husband, who passed away in 1987.

Even after she returned from Egypt, Loken continued to pursue her horse rescue and education efforts – raising money for The Brooke hospital, opening her own American branch, and writing numerous freelance articles about her horses. Looking back at all she has accomplished, she believes much of the reason her work with horses was possible is due to the region’s love and respect for the animals and previous female travelers to the region.

“None of this would have been possible without the women before me,” the octogenarian said of European female travelers who explored regions of Africa between the late 19th century and the early 20th century.

Loken – who still lives on her Reva farm with her border collier-black Labrador dog “Bo” – continues to support various other philanthropic efforts, including protection of open spaces and farmland and a program which brings broadcasts of live performances of The Metropolitan Opera to various local theaters, including Charlottesville’s Paramount Theater.