It is a Thursday evening in November at a friend’s exhibition in central Johannesburg, South Africa. This is where I meet a rather peculiar man, Ian Schwartz. We speak almost endlessly after being introduced to each other. He looks smart in a blue shirt, with the sleeves folded up, and jeans. The shirt has prints that look like vehicle emblems.
Schwartz is a 57-year-old engineer and photographer who recently wrote and published a book on racing cars that were produced in the 1950s in a workshop in Booysens, an industrial area close to the Crown Mines, 4kms south of Johannesburg’s business district. The book is titled Protea &#8211; The Story of an African Car.
Over bottles of beer, cars were the main subject of our conversation at the studio apartment exhibition.
<a href="http://www.forbesafrica.com/focus/2018/03/22/roads-without-drivers/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">READ MORE: Roads Without Drivers</a>
In January, I ask Schwartz if we could catch up and possibly do a story on Protea, which was originally made from only two prototypes, the Mark I and Mark II­­. The first chassis was built at a friend’s workshop. The drawing of the Mark II chassis is dated April 28, 1957. Both chassis where built from scratch and fitted with different engines from older racing cars. This creation was called Protea; the first sportscar made in South Africa.
These cars were built from scratch, out of scrap, and were ‘special’ to the 60s generation in South Africa. They could not afford racing cars exported from Europe, so they constructed their own in their backyards.
<div id="attachment_35713" style="width: 510px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-35713" class=" wp-image-35713" src="https://www.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/Protea-Ian-Schwartz-Book-Car-In-Workshop-copy-300x224.jpg" alt="" width="500" height="373" />Ian-Schwartz poses in front of the Protea in his garage with the book he published (Photo by Peter Hassall)</div>
Revved by our previous conversation, we meet at his home in Parktown, Johannesburg, to continue discussing the car.
“There was a guy in Benoni, he had a business that made fibreglass cars and there was this thing parked in the corner, so I asked about it. It was a big Afrikaans guy and he said ‘ah, this is a Protea’,” Schwartz recalls.
He found it interesting and returned six months later. However, he found a different person in charge – an Indian man who was the business partner of the Afrikaans man.
It was 2011, and the first thing Schwartz asked about was the car. Luckily for him, it was for sale for R17,000 ($1,400). The car was engineless with nothing but a red carpet inside. At the time, he didn’t know it was produced in South Africa. He went on to research the history behind the Protea and its development, and to also bring the original body back to life.
<div id="attachment_35707" style="width: 510px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-35707" class=" wp-image-35707" src="https://www.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/Protea-Triumph-Kyalami-002-copy-300x141.jpg" alt="" width="500" height="235" />A Protea Triumph leads a Jaguar XK140 through Clubhouse Corner at the newly opened Kyalami in the early 60s (Photo supplied)</div>
Schwartz then found out about a man named Alan Grant who knew a lot about the Protea and even owned one. They finally met at the Kyalami racetrack on a Saturday soon after.
Because the Protea had never been documented, Grant asked Schwartz to write a book about it and would further introduce him to the mastermind of the Protea, John Myers; a 96-year-old currently living in Strand, Cape Town.
“When I heard he was still alive, I said it was such a bargain and I met him. He’s an interesting guy, he was 89 then and he said ‘look, you are invited to my 90th birthday down in Strand; if I don’t get my wings before then’,” laughs Schwartz.
While doing research, he learned there was a team behind the Protea, namely Alec Roy and Ronald (Bob) Fincher. Another two, Rob and Miriam Hudson, came in later and were the main financial backers behind the car.
<div id="attachment_35715" style="width: 410px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-35715" class=" wp-image-35715" src="https://www.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/Protea-Rolling-Chassis-front-2-copy-300x240.jpg" alt="" width="400" height="320" />Ronald Fincher, Alec Roy and John Myers pose with the MK II prototype chassis (Photo supplied)</div>
Roy was an industrial chemist employed by De Beers at their diamond research laboratory. Fincher was employed by Hubert Davies Ltd, while Myers worked at Skylon workshop in Pretoria, before he became the only full-time employee on the premises, sleeping in the upstairs area of the workshop.
These were friends with the same goal of building a car that one could drive to work and still race on the weekends. Unfortunately, their dream couldn’t be fulfilled. Myers is the only one still alive to tell the tale of the first African sportscar.
“We used to put in about 16 hours a day working. I used to live in the flat above the workshop,” says Myers. “It was a dream, we had the dream but we knew we couldn’t keep on with it. We were all bachelors at the time, working all hours of the night; we couldn’t do that when we got married.”
<div id="attachment_35708" style="width: 408px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-35708" class=" wp-image-35708" src="https://www.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/Protea-Factory-300x235.jpg" alt="" width="398" height="312" />The home of South Africa&#8217;s first production car. John Meyers stayed in a small flatlet upstairs (Photo supplied)</div>
While speaking to Myers over the phone, although he talks slowly and I have to repeat myself now and then, he recalls everything as if it happened yesterday. He recalls overwhelming and horrific moments at the GRP Engineering Company workshop at the corner of 1st Avenue and 1st Street in Booysen’s Reserve.
“It was not a good place to be at night because I kept finding dead [bodies] lying about in the area,” he says.
He remembers a corrugated iron church nearby where they would often find the bodies of dead miners. In most of the pictures shot of the Protea, the church is in the background.
Despite the interesting details of the workshop, I was more excited to hear about his racing.
“I don’t drive anymore because my daughters won’t let me drive,” says Myers.
“One of the last rounds I made I had driven in the six-hour race in Pietermaritzburg the year before and we had come second. So we bought it back and took the running gear out and mounted it in one of the chassis. The others had fibre glass bodies but this one had aluminium. We finished that, we drove it down to Pietermaritzburg, won the race and drove it back again. No problem,” says Myers.
<div id="attachment_35709" style="width: 509px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-35709" class=" wp-image-35709" src="https://www.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/Protea-300x225.jpg" alt="" width="499" height="374" />Ian Schwartz&#8217;s Protea arrives on a trailer from Benoni to his home in Parktown, Johannesburg (Photo by Ian Schwartz)</div>
Myers says the car – that belongs to Grant – still races in historic events.
The Protea is unknown to most Africans. This might be due to the firm closing after the Receiver of Revenue knocked on their door and told them they did not have a customs duty clearance certificate for the vehicles they had produced and were selling. That was the death of the GRP Engineering Company.
<div id="attachment_35711" style="width: 511px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-35711" class=" wp-image-35711" src="https://www.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/Protea-JM-90th-and-Amy-2-copy-300x187.jpg" alt="" width="501" height="312" />John Myers and Ian Schwartz&#8217;s daughter Amy pose next to the MK II (Photo by Zunia Myers)</div>
The Protea turned 60 last year. Myers is sorry that Fincher and Roy are not alive to tell their story and enjoy the attention of the media.
“For the car&#8217;s 60th anniversary they came and took me off to the Franschhoek Motor Museum. They took the car out of the showroom and gave me a ride in it because they have a little track, and that was lovely,” he says.
Some of these cars now live in museums across South Africa, a few are stored in collectors’ garages, all of them still live in the drivers’ hearts.

The African Car That Is No More

From the heart of the Lower Zambezi National Park hundreds of miles from a town or on the streets of Lusaka, the name Mark O’Donnell is as common in Zambia as the Victoria Falls or Mosi Beer. On the streets they call him the Mall Man; the Zambian who made his fortune building places to stay and shop. In business, he is known as a ruthless strategist who wants to make money and cannot make it fast enough.
“Zambia is a small market but it’s a growing one, at six to seven percent a year, for the past 14 years. The economy of the country has grown much bigger. We’ve been fortunate to make investments when the time was appropriate… we just wanted to build a shopping mall,” says O’Donnell.
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O’Donnell is a born and bred Zambian and has walked a meandering path to riches.  At 18, O’Donnell was selling auto parts for someone else. But he dreamed of being an entrepreneur. Times were tough in the 1980s, when private money struggled in a socialist state run under tight regulations. Strangely, at a time when there was little to buy, he thought that malls could be just what Zambia needed.
“It was very difficult to do anything in Zambia. Ninety percent of the country was controlled by the state. You would drive around in Lusaka and all you would see were queues of people lining up to buy whatever commodities were in the stores. There were a lot of hardships,” he says.
This hardship led to riots and ushered out the 27 years of power for Zambia’s president Kenneth Kaunda and its policy of control. Frederick Chiluba led his Movement for Multiparty Democracy in the elections in 1991 on a ticket of free enterprise. Despite the freeing of the economy for private business, things got worse for O’Donnell. Private business was shrinking by the day.
“In the 1990s, business was pretty bleak. We were just plain contractors at that point, and we were just trying to find work. It was almost impossible to get regular types of work, so we had to be innovative. We had to figure out how we were going to make projects. So we went and designed our own projects,” he says.
O’Donnell decided to build a mall to keep his business running. Despite his fears, the Arcades Shopping Centre was built in 2003 and brought in a number of South African franchises, putting Zambia on the map for investment.
“Many people wondered why we were building a shopping mall when the market seemed like it was struggling,” he says.
It brought fame to the farthest reaches of the country, even to the far flung bush of the Lower Zambezi National Park. Hundreds of kilometers away, Joshua Chizuwa, who has been a game ranger for more than 40 years, has heard of him.
“I used to work as a construction worker for him during breaks from the bush a long time ago. O’Donnell was as a hard businessman, ruthless in his deals. I have seen his buildings rise and Lusaka has grown from his ventures. He’s changed the face of Lusaka,” says Chizuwa.
According to Trevor Simumba, a Zambian-born managing director of the Sub-Saharan Consulting Group, within Lusaka O’Donnell is regarded as a progressive businessman who saw the liberalization policies of the MMD in the nineties as an opportunity rather than a challenge.
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“He was very helpful to me when I was starting my career in the consulting field. At one point during a very difficult career transition, Mark said to me ‘Trevor it is always darkest before dawn’. This simple but profound statement helped me through and I always tell myself that whenever I face a challenge. Zambia is privileged to have Mark doing his business in Zambia. We need more role models like this in business in Zambia,” says Simumba.
O’Donnell also went into the hotel industry. It was a failed game lodge that saw O’Donnell go big. He negotiated a deal with Africa’s largest hotel group, Protea Hotels, a chain that has been targeted by Marriott International.
The first hotel O’Donnell built was in Chingola, in northern Zambia’s rich Copperbelt Province. He says it was a disaster.
“We opened it in the same week that Anglo American pulled out of Zambia. It wasn’t the best start to a hotel chain. There was zero occupancy for a couple of years,” he says.
It has taken 13 years of fighting back to expand seven more hotels. He is currently building his eighth in Lusaka, next door to his mall.
As the largest owner of hotels in Zambia it makes sense that O’Donnell wants tourism to boom. Until recently, he has been critical of the government’s efforts to encourage visitors. Tourism currently accounts for a mere 2% of Zambia’s gross domestic product. In August, the government announced a turnaround strategy to increase this to 7% in line with neighboring Zimbabwe. It has won over O’Donnell.
“You are talking about an industry that needs to double in size over the next five to 10 years. Our current arrivals are about 900,000 a year. If we take out non-tourist visits, we are probably looking at 300,000 tourists. I think what we would like to see that number grow to about 600,000 high spending visitors. We need to increase the visit to arrivals in Zambia. That’s our first priority. To raise Zambia’s profile in the key source markets and increase interest to come into Zambia either through leisure tourism or for business travel. Certainly both components have interest,” says O’Donnell.
Tourism in Zambia is difficult. O’Donnell says a ban on Zambian aircraft by the European Union (EU) has discouraged North Americans and Europeans.
“The agents won’t book internal flights due to insurance reasons. It’s purely to do with some technicalities that the EU won’t deal with, with our civil aviation authorities,” he says.
But his greatest challenge lies with Zambia’s marketing. According to O’Donnell, 60% of wealthy foreigners in North America, Asia and Europe have never heard of Zambia.
“Our customers demand a high quality sort of product. Just because this is Africa it doesn’t mean you can’t offer top class products to the market. Zambia is generally unspoilt, an environment untouched by commercialization. In some places in Africa you would find 20 minibuses around a lion, this doesn’t happen in Zambia. You can’t compare what we have with London and New York, but you have something different,” he says.
In a city that was little more than dirt roads, O’Donnell had a dream that many struggled to envision. Where people queued for hours to get their hands on commodities he saw malls with refrigerators. Today, O’Donnell’s buildings run alongside tarred roads and Zambians are eager to see what his next dream will be.

Tag: Protea

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