13/06/2026
EVEN BEFORE I BECAME A MAN – Part 2 – Becoming a Policeman
I always wanted to be a policeman.
Even as a child, and the oldest of four boys, I was always the sheriff. Being the eldest brother, it was ingrained in me to protect and to lead by example. My father wanted none of it.
He wanted me to join the Railways or Telkom. In his mind, those were respectable careers with a predictable future. Policing was not.
Having arrived back in South Africa from Rhodesia in 1980, I had two things against me. The first was that I could not speak a word of Afrikaans. The second was that my O Levels were regarded in South Africa as equivalent to a Standard 9 education. To obtain matric, I would have had to return to school for another year. I was done with school. I was 17 years of age.
I had completed my O Levels in 1979 and was already driving. In Rhodesia, a driver's licence could be obtained at sixteen. Looking back, life was very different then.
From the age of ten, whenever we travelled out of Salisbury, my father drove, my mother and three younger brothers sat in the back seat, and I sat in the passenger seat with my father's U*i on my lap. My instructions were simple. If he told me to shoot, I was to empty the magazine and reload another. Fortunately, I never had to fire that weapon.
Through family connections my father arranged for me to join the Railways. I was due to start work one morning in May 1980. Instead, I went to the beach. My father was furious. I told him I had no interest in the Railways.
Not giving up, he then arranged for me to join Telkom after I passed the entrance examination. The same thing happened. I never pitched for work.
Eventually my father threw up his hands and asked, "What do you want to do with your life?" "I want to be a policeman."
Knowing I couldn't speak Afrikaans, he struck a deal with me. "If they accept you into Police College despite that, then it was meant to be." Challenge accepted.
When the Afrikaans examination paper was placed in front of me, I simply wrote across the front page: "I cannot speak Afrikaans." Despite that, I was accepted. And so began the journey that would shape the rest of my life.
After a few days as a student at SAP Durban North, where I nearly sabotaged my career before it started by refusing to sweep the charge office on instruction from Sgt. Stompie Ellis, I was sent to Police College in Pretoria as part of the second intake of 1980. Stompie and I remain friends to this day.
At Police College, I immediately attracted attention. My instructor quickly discovered that I was a full-blooded Englishman, a "Soutpiel."
For those unfamiliar with the expression, a Soutpiel supposedly had one foot in England, one foot in South Africa, and his member dangling in the ocean between the two.
The instructor informed me that if I could not speak Afrikaans by the time we "klaared out," he would post me somewhere so Afrikaans that if I prayed in English, God Himself would not understand me. I took the hint.
The problem was that learning Afrikaans and understanding Afrikaans were not necessarily the same thing. For weeks I couldn't understand why I kept arriving late for duty. The instructors would demand that I be somewhere at "Half ses!" Being an English speaker, I assumed that meant half past six. It doesn't. It means half an hour before six. In other words, five-thirty.
By the time I figured that out, I had already been punished enough times to become intimately familiar with military discipline. Eventually the penny dropped, my Afrikaans improved, and the punishments became less frequent.
Then there was the band. Out of all possible duties, I was drafted into the police band and handed a trumpet. There was only one small problem. I had never played a trumpet in my life. No matter. Like learning Afrikaans, it was apparently something I was expected to master immediately. And somehow, I did.
Life in the platoon was another lesson altogether. There were thirty-six of us. Two perfectly aligned rows of eighteen beds. Every bed had to line up. Every pillow had to line up. Every sheet had to line up. Every trunk (trommel) had to line up. Everything had to shine. And there was zero tolerance for dust.
This was particularly interesting because Police College happened to be situated next to Iscor. You could clean your area to perfection, stand back and admire your work, and within a minute a fresh layer of dust would settle over everything. That didn't matter. The instructors weren't interested in excuses.
One of their favourite tricks was to grab a spotless white pillow and hurl it between the two rows of beds. He would then march over to where it landed, pick it up, inspect it dramatically, and inevitably announce "STOF!" (Dust). Whether there was dust or not was almost irrelevant. There was always going to be dust. The result was usually the same. Physical training.
And not just any physical training. There was a hill leading up towards the college hospital that became legendary among generations of policemen. It was affectionately known as "Hospitaal Bult." You normally met the hill shortly after being informed that your room inspection had failed.
The purpose of Police College was never simply to teach law, drill or procedure. The instructors had a job to do. They had to break you. Not in a cruel way, but in a way that tested your character, your discipline and your determination. Only then could they begin building you into a policeman.
Looking back now, more than four decades later, I realize those months taught me lessons that remained with me for life. Discipline. Resilience. Teamwork. Pride in your appearance. Respect for authority, even when you didn't always agree with it. Most importantly, they taught us that we were capable of far more than we thought. What a time it was even though my first pay cheque was a staggering R180.00.
The South Africa of 1980 was a very different country. We were young, stubborn, often terrified, frequently exhausted and usually broke. But we were living the times of our lives and didn't know it.
To those who shared that journey, whether at Police College, in the SAP, the Defence Force, the Railways, Telkom or anywhere else during those years, I invite you to share your stories and memories.
The older I get, the more I realize that while history remembers the events, it is the people who remember the moments.
And those moments are worth preserving.
Big shout out to Glen Olsen who slept in the bed next to me. Together we made it through College and had each others back. We too remain friends to this day along with Glen's wife Kerry who was Glen's girlfriend in the 80's. An example to so many, they are still happily married to this day.
