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A mosaic portrait of David Webster will be unveiled when a park in Troyeville is renamed in memory of the late anti-apartheid activist.
Remembering David
On Friday, 1 May, the Spaza Art Gallery in Troyeville will open a poster exhibition entitled Remembering David, with posters from the year of his death, 1989.
Lunch will be served at 1pm, and there will be poetry readings and performances in the afternoon.
Phone the gallery owner, Andrew Lindsay, on 011 614 9354 for more details. |
ACADEMIC and anti-apartheid activist David Webster is to be remembered by the City in the renaming of a park, to take place on the 20th anniversary of his death.
On 1 May 1989, Webster was gunned down outside his home in Troyeville by one of apartheid's killing agents, Ferdi Barnard. A decade later, in 1999, Barnard was sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder.
On Friday, 1 May this week, Bloemenhof Park in Troyeville, several blocks from where Webster lived and died, will be renamed David Webster Park. A mosaic plaque by artist Jacob Ramaboya from the suburb's Spaza Art Gallery, will be placed on a wall in the park.
David Webster shortly before his death
The plaque reads: "David Webster 1945-1989 Assassinated in Troyeville for his fight against apartheid - lived for justice, peace and friendship". A head and shoulders mosaic portrait of Webster will also be unveiled.
Maggie Friedman, Webster's partner, says she is very pleased with the renaming. "I think it is very appropriate. It is a lovely little park which is well used by the community."
It seems appropriate too that Webster will be remembered in mosaic - in 1999, on the 10th anniversary of his death, Friedman decorated the front wall of the house they shared in Eleanor Street with imaginative mosaic.
It depicts items of significance to Webster: a soccer ball is a reminder of his love of soccer and his membership of Orlando Pirates; and a bull is a reference to his work in the rural community of Kosi Bay, in northern KwaZulu-Natal, where he was conducting research.
Webster was shot dead as he and Friedman returned from walking their dogs. While opening the back of the car to let the dogs out, Barnard shot him with a shotgun from a slow-moving car. He fell to the pavement and died half an hour later.
Webster's simple gravestone in Westpark Cemetery
An anthropologist at the University of the Witwatersrand, Webster became involved in student politics at Rhodes University. He worked with the Detainee Parents' Support Committee, the End Conscription Campaign, the Five Freedoms Forum, and the Detainees' Education and Welfare Organisation.
Friedman believes he was murdered because of his knowledge relating to Renamo, a South African-backed anti-government movement in Mozambique. He was killed just nine months before Nelson Mandela was released from jail, when apartheid was rapidly unwinding amid the turmoil and violence of repeated states of emergency, bombings, marches, boycotts and sanctions.
The Johannesburg Development Agency (JDA) is responsible for the conversion of the park, at a cost of R120 000, together with City Parks.
In 2006/07 the JDA oversaw an upgrade of the park, spending R3,7-million. Play equipment was repaired and upgraded; a chess board was created; the gazebo was refurbished; the clubhouse was upgraded; new sports facilities - tennis, basketball, running and soccer - were built; and the fence was repaired and new artistic gates installed.
Webster is buried at Westpark Cemetery, in Emmarentia.
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