PILLARS of smoke spiralled slowly into the morning sky as we picked our way through the rubble of the previous night's rioting. The smell of thousands of coal fires mingled with the stench of burning rubber and alcohol spilt from countless looted liquor stores, created a heady odour of oppression and violence.

From inside our Land Rover, I held tightly onto my rifle as I took in the dusty streets and matchbox houses of Alexandra, near Johannesburg.

It was first time in my 18 years that I, as a white South African police student, had been in a black township, and it felt as though I was in a foreign country.

Tumbling into the street, weighed down with ammunition and weaponry, my orders still ring in my ears: "If they bend down to pick up a stone shoot... and shoot to kill... even if they are bending down to tie up a shoelace." "If they show the black power sign or shout amandlha (power), they are fair game as well," said a middle-ranking policeman accompanying us.

For me, this was to be the start of a personal journey from being a willing soldier of apartheid to a staunch opponent of the iniquitous system.

It was a few days earlier, just weeks away from completing our training in Pretoria, that the first news had come through. Filtered through the Government-sponsored radio service, details were sketchy and hid the full import of what was happening.

Communist agitators were responsible for stirring up riots, schools were being burned, stones thrown, people shot. But the police "had the situation under control". The police college rumour mill took over from there. The country was in flames. We were going to help.

Within hours, this was confirmed when we were called to the parade ground. Without a word of explanation, we were marched off to the armoury where instructors feverishly broke open ammunition boxes and doled out bullets like sweets to eager children. Four boxes each of R1 rounds for our high velocity .762 assault rifles and two boxes each of 9mm bullets for our service pistols - to go with a truncheon and a bayonet.

Marched off to another store, we were given two oranges and two apples each and told not to eat them - doubtless they were emergency provisions.

And then the wait, as we worked each other up with talk of war. This was June 1976, and the final reckoning. The country was in revolt and we were there to defend the last bastion of Christian society against the Communist aggressors who were using black people to do their bidding.

And then we were off to Johannesburg to bolster the existing forces.

There was a frisson of excitement as we arrived in the city. White motorists hooted and flashed their lights, shouting encouragement. "Shoot the kaffirs. Shoot them all." The few black people who were venturing to work greeted us with sullen, silent stares.

By the time we arrived, there had already been three days and nights of rioting, burning and looting. The official death toll was more than 100 dead and 1,000 injured. Prime Minister John Vorster had told the country order would be restored "at all costs" and we were there to ensure just that.

As police students, we never found ourselves in the front line and were used instead to guard strategic installations, burned-out schools and government buildings. Some had to keep watch over the mortuaries and came back from the day's duty visibly shaken, with stories of bodies dumped unceremoniously on top of each other on bare floors.

In the police canteen, I listened as a group of security policemen joked about how they had "helped" a prisoner out of a tenth-floor window.

"He landed on my car," one said. And they all folded over with laughter.

The period was to provide my first lessons in oppression.

Having been conscripted into the police to do my compulsory military training, I did not initially have political views, apart from being inculcated with the tenets of white superiority. And rather than questioning prevailing attitudes, it was all too easy to fall in with my peers. My prejudices fed off what I saw. I thought blacks were uncivilised, centuries behind us. I mean, give them schools and look what they do with them - burn them down, I reasoned. They just don't appreciate what we are doing for them. And, anyway, they are only puppets of their communist masters and not fit to govern. Look at the mess the rest of Africa is in. The only language they understand is violence. The most often repeated phrase in the police was: "The only good kaffir is a dead kaffir."

Filled with our sense of self-rectitude, we could not and did not want to see it from their perspective. And neither had we been told just why they were rioting.

As I was to find out later, it was a government directive that Afrikaans and English must be used equally for instruction in black secondary schools that provided the spark for the dry tinder of resentment and started the riots.

Afrikaans, the language of the Dutch-descended section of the white community (who comprised more than 90 per cent of the police force) was considered the language of oppression; of pass laws, permits and police.

Responsible protests from the African Teachers' Association were contemptuously ignored. Then several schools went out on strike and, on June 16, 10,000 Soweto schoolchildren streamed towards Orlando Stadium to show their solidarity. Aged between 12 and 20, they stood a mile deep when they were stopped by a phalanx of heavily-armed police.

Accounts of the day are confused. But, according to one witness, it was a policeman who, both figuratively and literally, cast the first stone.

The children responded by picking up their own stones. But before one was thrown in return, a shot rang out... and then another... and then another.

One policeman was seen aiming and firing his pistol at a group of pupils standing just in front of him. His victim was 13-year-old Hector Peterson. The photograph of grief-stricken friends running with his dead body was emblazoned on front pages of newspapers around the world, provoking universal condemnation. His death was to be swiftly followed by others as rioting and looting spread to Mamelodi, Gugulethu, Alexandra.

By the end of the riots, the official death toll was 130 with 1,118 more injured. Twenty-two policemen were also injured.

The riots were to lead to a change in the complexion of South Africa's political map, as younger generations vented the frustrations of their elders against the hated race laws. Hundreds fled the country to join their cadres in Umkhonto we Sizwe, the ANC's the military wing.

As the riots petered out, we were called into a gymnasium and collectively sworn to silence. But 25 years on, it is hard to see how the truth of those bloody days could ever have been repressed.

It is with a deep sense of humility that I find myself looking back on the journey I have taken since that cold day in the back of a police Land Rover.

Acknowledging the part I played in supporting the system is personally painful. But, perhaps, having been part of and having been exposed so harshly to man's inhumanity to man, and having undergone a profound transformation, has given me a far deeper appreciation and respect for my fellow human travellers.

And, considering the miraculous changes wrought since June 16, 1976, other trouble-torn countries could well take lessons from the South African experience.