Looking Back
Forty-eight years of Apartheid in South Africa, the system needed people to enforce it. Brian Nel was one such person. Serving as a police officer, regularly he would be called to quell riots in the black townships of Cape Town. He’s changed though, from being a staunch racist policeman in those days, presently he lives as an openly gay man taking tourists on cultural tours of the city. This transformation however did not happen overnight and he needed a bit of Madiba Magic to get things started.

Raised tough
Nel came to South Africa as a nine year-old from Zimbabwe and recounts his shock at being given a school uniform and an army uniform. “As part of the indoctrination at the time we had a military parade every Friday afternoon,” he says. The Apartheid government had felt threatened by the “rooi gevaar” and this prompted them to start recruiting for soldiers at a young age, even if it meant taking their recruitment drive to primary schools.

No choice
“Many white males feared the thought of giving two years of their life to the army where they had to contend with fighting Cubans in Angola, says Nel.
“You could skip the country, be a conscientious objector or face two years in imprisonment,” he adds.
Nel though took, what was considered to be, the easy way out by joining the police as a 19 year-old. Considered easy because compared to the army, policemen only had six months of training before being deployed in “hotspots”- the black townships. “At that age I just wanted to get out of the system,” Nel says but he stayed on.

Seeing action
As a policeman, he was trained in riot control, although he admits that he and other policemen were afraid of riotous crowds in the townships. The police realised how powerless they were in the face of widespread anger at the death of ANC leader Chris Hani who was assassinated in 1993, an event that brought South Africa on the brink of a civil war. “For a week, while the country mourned his death, it exploded,” says Nel of a time when South Africa held its collective breath, fearing for the worst possible outcome.

Crossing the Rubicon
“For me things started to change when I had to work with black people, as an equal,” he says of the time he spent working in South Africa’s VIP protection unit. Having been a racist, by circumstance, all his life the new challenge was both frustrating and a revelation to Nel.
“I had been in the Presidential Guard previously, which was all-white. I told my mother that they wanted me to work with black people.
“I never dealt with them on an equal footing. I did not understand them. Never had I interacted with my black colleagues but realised that they had lives each time I took them home at night or fetched them in the morning,” he says on realising that black people actually lived normal lives.

Breaking down the stereotype
At this point questions started to rear in the back of his head. “Maybe I can eat with them.” He says that white parents were never racist but taught their children to live within the system and not to oppose it. Nel says: “People in South Africa hated each other because their lives were closed off to one another.

Madiba Magic
One night while providing protection to the country’s new leadership, Nel and his colleagues were shocked when President Nelson Mandela thanked each one of them with a handshake. This was for the service they had provided and the sacrifice of being away from the families. “In all the years that I’ve guarded the Apartheid leaders, I never saw such a gesture,” says Nel.

Recovering racist?
Nel says that for him racism is like alcoholism, “You’re never cured; the slightest provocation brings out that bad side. Like for instance when a black taxi driver swerves in front of me without signaling.” For him though this is the constant conflict in his head.

Coming Out
While he served in the police in the early 1990s, Nel also came out about his homosexuality. “After coming out of Police College I regularly frequented gay bars but I was careful, police who were found out to be gay were subject to ‘indoctrination’.

Changing uniform
Now that he’s changed his police uniform for civilian clothing, people in the township perceive him differently. Fear and loathing has been replaced by acceptance in these places which were once urban battlegrounds. “People, in the townships, are now actually talking to me where in the past they would look at me with mistrust,” says Nel.