His collection is a magnificent obsession that is quite rightly starting to attract attention to a dusty dorp.
Car collector Freek de Kock poses next to one of his cars at his museum on May 19, 2018 in Bothaville, South Africa. Picture: Gallo Images / Netwerk24 / Deon Raath
All the excitement last weekend might have been centred on Ellis Park, but further down the road, 220km in fact, one man was even more ebullient.
Bothaville businessman Freek de Kock has the largest private collection of Nissan and Datsun vehicles in the world.
Thanks to the recent closure of the Nissan production facility outside Pretoria, he’s got five more to add to the more than 200 in his museum and on Friday, he was showing them off to visitors.
Each one of the donations tells a particular story: the first Nissan Navara to be built in the country; the last model of the NP200 – the successor to the legendary Datsun 1400 bakkie; a Datsun Go concept rally car, an X-Trail e-POWER and a Leaf, the world’s first commercially produced electric vehicle.
They add to a collection that has every variant of the everyman high-performance GTR and 240Z, as well as a host of Fairladys, to the evolution of the Patrol in all its iterations.
De Kock’s whole is greater than the sum of his parts. The collection is a magnificent obsession that is quite rightly starting to attract attention to a dusty dorp that is better known for the annual five-day phenomenon that is Nampo, but it also speaks to the importance of conserving the past that we may properly understand the future.
We live in a world that is changing so fast and so profoundly that things which were commonplace – and vital – even 30 years ago, are as foreign and forgotten to today’s generation as the dinosaurs and the Jurassic period were to our generation.
Telephones, telexes, cameras that used film have been taken over by the ubiquitous smartphone; newspapers and broadcasters are locked in an existential struggle with many already consigned to the dustbin of history.
And we are much the poorer for that, even though we live in an era where we have never had the kind of unfettered access to a veritable information highway that we have now.
But in Bothaville, a collection of cars that would otherwise have been stripped for spares or left to rust and rot in a scrapyard, live on in pristine condition for posterity, all because of the passion of a single man.
De Kock didn’t start with a grand plan. He didn’t look for handouts; he followed his passion. There’s a lesson in that for all of us.
