Die Helderburger Motoring Desk (such as it is)
There is a particular strain of South African pride that does not announce itself through a flag, a rugby jersey, or even a biltong stand at the side of the road. It announces itself through seven characters of pressed aluminium, bolted to the back of a Polo Vivo, BMW or a Chines model, daring the entire R44 to admire it at a red light.
We are, of course, talking about the personalised number plate, known to officialdom as a PRN (Personalised Registration Number) and known to everyone else as “ja, my husband insisted.”
Our reporter set out this week to understand why the Helderberg has, in recent months, developed what can only be described as an outbreak of vanity plates. The investigation took us from the Strand beachfront to the Macassar turn-off, and left us with the uncomfortable realisation that practically everyone we spoke to already had one, was applying for one, or was bitterly disputing someone else’s.
The Rules, For Those Still Pretending to Care About Rules
For the uninitiated: South African law permits any vehicle owner to apply for an alphanumeric combination of no more than seven characters, subject to approval by the relevant department, provided the number is available and not deemed rude, obscene, or offensive. In the Western Cape, the very shortest plates — the one-, two- and three-character combinations so beloved of Sea Point dentists and Stellenbosch professors can fetch around R10,000, while the longer seven-character combinations are considerably cheaper, at roughly R1,750.
Which is to say: brevity, in this country, is a luxury good. Somewhere a philosophy lecturer is weeping.
Our Local Entrants
Word reached us early that Kobus Liebenberg had been spotted at the licensing department in Strand clutching a handwritten list of seventeen possible combinations, all variations on the theme of “BRAAI.” When asked why the seventeenth attempt, BRAAI4U, had also been rejected, Kobus explained, with the weary dignity of a man who has fought this battle before, that apparently half of Mpumalanga had got there first. He has settled, for now, on KOBUS1, which he insists is “not vanity, it’s just easier for the parking guys to remember me by.”
Letta van der Westhuizen, never one to let a trend pass without commentary, has gone in the opposite direction entirely. Her new plate reads simply HMPH, which she swears is a coincidence relating to her late husband’s initials, and which nobody at the Helderburger believes for one second.
Down at the winery, Sebastiaan spent a full bottle of his own Pinotage deliberating between WINE GUY and the rather more ambitious SOMM1, before a passing tasting-room guest gently informed him that the latter was already taken by an actual sommelier in Franschhoek, and not, as Sebastiaan had hoped, reserved by destiny for him alone.
Fanus Botes, meanwhile, remains the only person in recorded Helderberg history to apply for a personalised plate and be rejected on the grounds of “unclear intent.” The department, we are told, simply could not work out what FB OOM was supposed to mean, and Fanus, to his credit, could not adequately explain it either.
Marietjie van Tonder new to the Helderberg area has gone the sentimental route, her plate now reads OUMA M, a tribute to her grandchildren that has the unfortunate side effect of causing every car guard from Gordon’s Bay to Macassar to greet her, warmly and at volume, as “Ouma” regardless of whether they have ever met her.
And Lizette Petersens, who runs the book club WhatsApp group with the ruthless efficiency of a small intelligence agency, has quietly informed us that she will not be revealing her plate choice in print, on the grounds that “some of us have standards, unlike Kobus.”
A Field Guide to Plate Psychology
It was a plate spotted well outside Helderberg jurisdiction, BIGWORM, glimpsed by this reporter idling outside a Spar on the N1, that finally cracked the case open for us. The natural assumption, on seeing BIGWORM, is that the driver is either an entomologist or labouring under some other misapprehension entirely. He is neither. Nobody who spent four years studying invertebrates feels the need to announce it from a Toyota; if he did, the plate would carry the Latin, not the marketing copy. No, BIGWORM belongs to a much older and more universal category, which our extensive fieldwork in the Helderberg now allows us to formally classify.
There is, first, The Boast — BIGWORM falls squarely here, alongside the late Jeremy Mansfield’s FATMAN GP. The defining feature of the Boast is that the claim and the reality are, by sheer force of statistics, almost never the same thing. As a rule of thumb: the more specific and impressive the plate, the less anyone should take it at face value. Nobody whose situation actually matched the claim would feel the need to make it.
Then there’s The Accidental Confession, best represented locally by Letta van der Westhuizen’s HMPH, which she insists is a tribute to her late husband’s initials and which says considerably more than she intended regardless of what it stands for.
The Aspirational Lie belongs to Sebastiaan, whose flirtation with SOMM1 revealed a man who has, by his own admission, opened roughly four bottles of wine with any real ceremony in his entire career, despite owning the winery.
The Inside Joke Nobody Else Will Ever Get is Kobus’s natural habitat — KOBUS1 reads as harmless modesty until you learn it was the consolation prize after seventeen rejected BRAAI variants, a joke that exists now only between Kobus and the Western Cape vehicle registration database.
And finally, The Pure Admin Error — Fanus Botes’s doomed FB OOM, which was not vanity at all, simply a man’s actual initials colliding unfortunately with a province that found the whole thing too confusing to approve. Some plates are jokes. Fanus’s was just bad luck wearing a joke’s clothing.
We leave it to readers to decide which category their own neighbour falls into. We suspect most of you already know.
The Real Hall of Fame
To be clear, the Helderberg is a relative latecomer to this national sport. South Africans have been perfecting the vanity plate for decades, and the results occasionally outlive the cars themselves. Among the legends: the late radio personality Jeremy Mansfield once drove around Johannesburg with the plate FATMAN GP, a piece of self-deprecating branding that long outlasted his radio career. Industry observers have also noted, not entirely flatteringly, that BMW drivers in particular seem to have a well-developed sense of humour about themselves, a claim this publication neither confirms nor denies, having seen the evidence at the Waterstone Village parking lot with our own eyes.
Between You and Me
If I’m honest, I went into this story expecting to mock it and came out slightly charmed by the whole business. There’s something very South African about spending R1,750 or, if you’re feeling reckless, R10,000 just so a stranger at a traffic light has to do a double-take and a small laugh. We are, as a nation, constitutionally incapable of letting a blank space go unfilled with a joke. Even our licence plates can’t resist a punchline. I’d call it a character flaw, except it’s also rather the best thing about us.
Next time: the Helderburger Motoring Desk investigates whether anyone in Somerset West actually knows how the Lourens Street traffic circle is supposed to work, or whether we have all simply agreed, as a community, to wing it.
DIE HELDERBURGER
Motoring Desk
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