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did routine student police work until 1969, at which time I attended the police training college in Pretoria and graduated at the end of 1969 as a fully-qualified police constable.

I was posted to a uniformed branch in Johannesburg in a suburb called Park View in 19...during 1970.

I did normal beat, normal uniformed police work, but I also wrote the sergeant's exams, and in 1970 I think, late 70, I passed to sergeant and was promoted.

I was then posted from Park View to Ranburg, to a plain-clothes unit specialising in housebreaking, called "the special housebreaking unit".

The reason I was transferred was because in those days it was very unusual for a 21-year-old to be a sergeant and when you had 40-year-old constables with 20-years' experience, they wouldn't listen to a 21-year-old sergeant with one year, two years' experience.

While I was with the housebreaking unit I was approached by members of the security police who had heard somehow that I wanted to go to university, because the reason I joined the police in the first place was to do several years full-time service rather than the national service in the military, which meant you had to do one year and then every year for the next ten or fifteen years you had to do.

So I decided to get my service over, get some experience, go to university and study law.

When I was approached by these gentlemen, they told me there was a way to go to university to study but to stay in the police and to have my studies paid and to join the security police, which sounded very exciting.

So I did, and in 1972 or late in 1971 I resigned from the South African police and then went under the wing of the security police and in 1972 I became a student at the university of Witwatersrand.




In that year there was some confrontation between the police and students in South Africa



I got to know my fellow people who had been charged: quite a large number of students had been arrested.

Then I became involved in the arts faculty council and the NUSAS: National Union of South African Students, the local committees, and by 1973 I was already on the local committees of the arts faculty council and... I think let's just all open them all at once at once then with one noise.

So, as I was saying, in 1973 I became involved on committee level with NUSAS and the arts faculty council and I went to the NUSAS national congress, which is... Can I use NUSAS now? National Union of South African Students. And I started becoming quite involved.

By the end of 1973

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