May 1, 2007
By Lucille Davie
IT was so ordinary, South Africa's first Workers' Day 18 years ago, but it was a day that changed the life of Maggie Friedman.
Friedman was the partner of David Webster, an academic and anti-apartheid activist. On that day, 1 May, 1989, Webster was shot dead outside their home in Eleanor Street, Troyeville.
"That day completely changed my life - it took a completely different path to what it would have been," says Friedman now, nearly two decades later.
They had returned from an ordinary task - walking the dogs. They had taken the dogs in Webster's bakkie and returned at around 10 o'clock. In 1996, Friedman told the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) what happened that day.
"David was driving, he parked the car in our street in front of our house and he got out of the car to go out to the back to let the dogs out of the car and I was getting out more slowly on the passenger side and I was aware of a car coming down the street and then I heard what I thought was a car backfiring and it accelerated down the street and it was only afterwards that I realised something was wrong when I saw that David was staggering and he was holding his chest in the front and he said to me, 'I've been shot by a shotgun, get an ambulance'".
Then Friedman said something chilling: "So David obviously saw his killers, he saw the weapon that killed him, and then he fell down on the pavement and he died about a half an hour later."
A lecturer and researcher
Webster, born in Zambia in 1945, was an anthropologist who joined Wits University as a lecturer and researcher in 1970. He became involved in anti-apartheid politics after he took part in a protest in 1965 at Rhodes University. The protest was against black students being barred from watching the university's first rugby team from playing.
His doctoral thesis focused on migrant workers from Mozambique, exposing him to their exploitation by government and business.
According to history website sahistory.org, "This led him to integrate his academic critique of government policies with anti-apartheid political activism." He was involved in the Detainee Parents' Support Committee, the End Conscription Campaign, the Five Freedoms Forum, and the Detainees' Education and Welfare Organisation.
At the time of his death he was doing research at Kosi Bay on the KwaZulu-Natal north coast. "He was asking questions about things that were happening there and I know there was a lot of speculation that the reason he was killed was because he knew about Renamo [a South African-backed anti-government movement in Mozambique] connections that were happening through there, and I think he did know quite a lot about what was going on in those parts, but he wasn't writing a report as far as I know," Friedman told the TRC.
Lloyd Vogelman, a founder and former director of the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation, writes in a 1990 tribute to Webster that "Dave Webster could not die. He was too much part of life. He was too much part of progressive life in South Africa. He was too much part of mine, my friends' and colleagues' history".
He goes on: "His dedication, loyalty, gentleness, knowledge and expertise ensured that we were at his door frequently."
Apartheid meltdown
Webster's assassination came just nine months before Nelson Mandela was released from prison, and the final meltdown of apartheid. The country had been unwinding for some time - in 1985, apartheid's fundamental laws, the Mixed Marriages Act and Immorality Act were repealed, while the Group Areas Act was amended, to be repealed finally in 1991, together with the 1913 Land Act.
In 1989 the country was a swirling mess of repeated states of emergency, bombings, state-sanctioned killings of innocent people in townships, strikes, mass marches and boycotts, tightening sanctions and media restrictions. People disappeared, and were never seen again.
Vogelman says Webster "would have dearly loved to have been an open member of the African National Congress". More than that, "we should also never forget how much more he could have given to our country and how much we needed him".
Selling the house
Friedman's life didn't change immediately. She stayed on at their home for another 14 years before selling up and moving to the nearby suburb of Kensington. "It was a comfort staying on," she says. "It was quite hard to leave, but I was ready to leave four years ago."
Friedman says it is a beautiful old house. "It has big rooms, a wide passage with archways, an old stove and pressed steel ceilings." She renovated the house and put in attractive features such as bay windows, and built a cottage in the back yard.
In 1991, two years after Webster's death, she adopted a child, later adopting a second.
In 1999, on the 10th anniversary of Webster's death and with the help of artist Ilsa Pohl, Friedman decorated the front wall of the house with beautiful mosaic containing symbols significant to her slain partner.
The mosaic washes along the low boundary wall of the house and then over the whole of its two brick gateposts. On either side of the posts is a bull - a reference, says Friedman, to his work with the rural community in Kosi Bay. A bowl on the front step is symbolic of the washing of hands, a ceremony from his funeral. A soccer ball is depicted, a reminder of his love of soccer and membership of Orlando Pirates. A giraffe image recalls an angel. Mosaic hands appear along the wall and the posts, those of Friedman's two children, Pohl's child and several neighbours' children.
Mosaic tribute to David Webster
Inscribed in mosaic on the wall are the words: "Assassinated here for his fight against apartheid. Lived for justice, peace and friendship."
Eighteen years earlier, Webster's funeral was attended by thousands of people. The procession walked from St Mary's Cathedral in the CBD to Westpark Cemetery in Montgomery Park, a distance of some seven kilometres. All the way, police vehicles lined the route - it was the first big funeral of an anti-apartheid activist, says Friedman.
Life imprisonment
In 1999 apartheid hitman Ferdi Barnard was sentenced to life imprisonment for the assassination of Webster. He had apparently boasted about it to colleagues.
Barnard was a member of the Civil Cooperation Bureau, a covert unit of the South African Defence Force that was, in reality, the apartheid government's killing machine. At one time the bureau was under the command of Eugene de Kock, known then and after as "Prime Evil" and "Scourge of God". Both Barnard and De Kock now sit in cells in the C-Max high security prison in Pretoria. De Kock was found guilty of 89 charges, six of them murder.
In De Kock's tell-all book
A long night's DAMAGE, published in 1998, he says of the murder: "In retrospect, the killing of Webster was, besides being an appalling waste of human life, a major miscalculation on the part of those who decided to kill him, doubtless the CCB.
"For one thing, the days of apartheid stalwart PW Botha were numbered and his successor FW de Klerk would, less than a year later, in February 1990, lead the country to a place that had featured only in Botha's worst nightmares."
De Kock estimates that 50 people were assassinated between 1977 and 1989.
Friedman says Barnard showed no remorse when he was sentenced. She's unhappy that he didn't implicate those who ordered the murder, he didn't "finger people who were behind it". Instead, if he'd shown "true remorse, he could have wrapped the whole parcel".
For her it was a tough 10 years before the sentencing. There were numerous commissions of enquiry, investigations, inquests, rumours and phone calls. But at least now the sentencing has "put to rest my struggle for any justice". She regrets that so many people will not know justice for their loved ones lost.
In the words of Vogelman: "David's life tells us that we do have a responsibility to confront the evil and the harsh, but that we should never forget our humour and take pleasure in the parts of our world which are filled with goodness. We must never forget."
Webster's simple gravestone in Westpark has the following inscription: "Our beloved David Joseph Webster. Born 19 December 1945, Assassinated 1 May 1989. Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends."
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