N

OTHING really happens in Bothaville. No, that’s a lie. Each year in May this dusty Free State locale plays host to the Nampo trade show: a four-day spectacular designed to tempt local farmers with the latest and greatest in agricultural wizardry.

It attracts hundreds of thousands of people. Most will drive to its gates but many will fly, their helicopters rising and falling like frenzied bumblebees. These visitors gaze in rapture at wondrous new contraptions that people like me will never understand. Groups of burly men admire a machine that transforms tree trunks into wood chips in milliseconds; others seem more enamored with the tractor as tall as a single-story house.

Elsewhere, enormous horned beasts lie hot and silent in pens lined with sawdust. The John Deere merchandise tent is packed and every 30m there is a kiosk selling coffee, biltong and vetkoek. Clearly this is the place to be.

Except it isn’t. If you like cars then you’re better off taking a drive down to Stasiestraat where a man named Freek (I’m not allowed to tell you his surname) owns a nondescript building that is home to what is apparently the largest collection of Datsun and