Le Raid au Cap: FN and the first Belgians to cross Africa by car

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Motor shows as we knew them may be a thing of the past now, but we were fortunate to have them for over a century, with hundreds of photographs surviving as evidence of some of the greatest efforts in automotive marketing. This picture is a beautiful example of marketing at its grandest. What we see is an FN, made in Belgium, at the Amsterdam Motor Show of 1929. But it’s not your average brand-new, highly-polished and immaculately-presented show car, and that makes this one all the more interesting.

The beaten-up saloon had, as a matter of fact, just returned from a monster trip from Liège to Cape Town and shows off its scars from the cross-Continental trip in all their rugged splendour. If you think that trip would be adventurous today, imagine how it must have been back in the 1920s. Even Tintin in the Congo hadn’t been published yet. The journey was undertaken by Belgian aeronautical pioneer Robert Fabry. When FN heard of Fabry’s African adventures by aeroplane they thought they’d ask him to undertake a similar journey by motor car in 1928. Similar promotional raids had been carried out by French teams, using the well-known half-tracked and fully-prepared Citroën-Kégresse vehicles, but FN decided to take a different path. Apart from a limited number of spare parts and considerably larger (65-gallon) petrol tanks, the cars used by Fabry and his team were just about standard. With two cars and four men. they left Liège on May 13th, 1928, and followed the route south to Geneva, Lyon and Marseilles, and on to Algiers by ship.

In Africa things started to become difficult soon enough. Temperatures supposedly reached 131 degrees Fahrenheit in Reggan, where the two teams got lost. They found their way back after a delay of four but had thousands and thousands of miles ahead of them still. They travelled through Nigeria, the Congo, Uganda and Kenya and were crossing Chad in the rainy season when one of the cars got stuck in the forest of Kamega. Two days were spent to get it moving again and repair the burned clutch with the help of an Irish colonist. In the mountains that followed, one of the cars’ rear axle packed up. A new part had to be ordered from Nairobi while the car was towed to Arusha by 16 oxen. At the end of July, the cars carried on to Kigoma and Dar-Es-Salaam. Unfortunately, the next stretch saw forest fires in which one of the cars got trapped, and with the big 65-gallon petrol tank going up in flames, it was totally destroyed. Fabry and his co-driver decided to carry on in the sole surviving car, while the other two team members continued the trip in a separate car which they hired from a South African colonist. They still had a massive journey ahead of them then but eventually reached Cape Town on August 25th, averaging a very impressive 137 miles a day over 105 days in total.

The surviving car was transported back to Europe by ship to Dover to be exhibited in a number of exhibitions, this one in Amsterdam having been documented beautifully. Does anyone know what happened to it afterwards?

Words: Jeroen Booij

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