NUSAS Pays Tribute to David Webster
David Webster (1 December 1944 – 1 May 1989) was a South African academic and anti-apartheid activist. He worked as an anthropologist at the University of the Witwatersrand, where he was a senior lecturer at the time of his assassination.
Webster was a founding member of the Detainees' Parents' Support Committee (DPSC) in 1981, a founder member of the Five Freedoms Forum, and a committed comrade in the United Democratic Front. Webster was also an active member of the Orlando Pirates supporters' club and he assisted in the mobilisation and organisation of South African musicians during the Struggle in the 1980s.
He was a long-term ethnographic researcher and his work near Kosi Bay on the Mozambican border resulted in a number of peer-reviewed academic publications.
Webster was assassinated by apartheid security forces outside his home on 1 May 1989.
The National Union of South African Students (NUSAS) was an important force for liberalism and later radicalism in South African student anti-apartheid politics, founded in 1924. Its mottos included non-racialism and non-sexism.
By the early 1990s South African students began to see the need to consolidate their efforts to finally rid South Africa of racist controls and to re-focus on education issues. NUSAS was merged with black controlled student movements into a single non-racial progressive student organization, the South African Student Congress (SASCO), in 1991.
On 2 July 1991, NUSAS dissolved with the conclusion of its 67th congress.
Illustrations by Bridget Hilton-Barber, author of nine books including “Student Comrade Prisoner Spy”.
209mm x 298mm
R1,000