Durban - There’s camo and there’s camo. One of several hundred 1200cc Harley-Davidson motorcycles sent to the Union Defence Forces of South Africa is in a Durban North garage, stripped of its matt olive green that served as camouflage, and painted white.
The reason: “reverse” camouflage because during the war in Zimbabwe, the civilian owner feared he and any passenger in the sidecar might be mistaken for somebody military and become a target.
“Maybe he thought it would be seen to be a Red Cross or United Nations motorcycle,” said its current owner, Christopher James, who has had a passion for motorcycles for 50 years.
“That would have reduced his chances of being struck by an AK-47 bullet or an RPG rocket.”
Having clocked only 6862.4 miles (about 11 000km), James believes the machine crossed the Limpopo River border on the back of a truck.
More than a thousand 750cc Harley-Davidsons came into the army on a military contract in 1941, he said, followed by several hundred 1200cc models with sidecars the next year.
“After the war, the army had a lot of trouble getting rid of them," he said. "They almost gave them away.”
James fell in love with Harley-Davidsons as a schoolboy in Ixopo when his friend splashed out R20 to buy a collection of parts lying in the shed of a rider who used Harleys to do his rounds as a stock inspector.
“They were plentiful and cheap and eventually he had a whole cowshed full of them.”
They put one together and kept it at Ixopo High School where they were boarders.
On their free Sundays, still too young to have licences, they would sneak past the town’s police station to his friend’s farm to spend the day working on building more Harleys from all the parts.
So far, James has only taken his camo white Harley around the block, but he doesn’t write off the idea of one day taking a grand run on the road parallel to the beachfront promenade.