Chapter 1: Gangsters and boxers of Westbury

Forty years ago today champion boxer Cameron Adams and Westbury gang leader Vincent Stuurman were hanged at Pretoria central prison for murder.

But a TimesLIVE Premium probe into the rise of the gangs in the coloured enclave of Johannesburg has found survivors from that period who insist that one of them should not have been condemned to death.

It was never my intention to look for evidence that might have exonerated the two men or sought to convict others.

The terms of the research were simply to track a tragic and bloody journey of various youths:

In 1973 teenagers Adams and Desmond Stuurman, one of Vincent’s older brothers, went to the South African Games in Pretoria to compete at the first-ever mixed-race amateur boxing tournament, at least since the advent of apartheid.

Less than a decade later Adams and Vincent, boss of the Spaldings, were found guilty of murder and sentenced to death.

They tried to appeal their sentencing and attempted to have a retrial introducing new evidence. They also sought clemency from two state presidents, first Marais Viljoen and then PW Botha.

But all attempts to have their death sentences commuted failed and at 7am on November 20, 1984, Adams and Stuurman, standing upon two trapdoors of the gallows, plunged to their deaths with the pull of a lever.

This series of articles covers the violent stories of Adams, the Stuurman brothers and others who lived through the eruption of gang-on-gang violence in Westbury, a slum created by the National Party government.

Not even the opening up of sport racially and carrying realistic dreams of challenging for a world title could break Adams and Desmond Stuurman free of the gravitational pull of the frenzied feuding in Western, as Westbury used to be called.

Today the violence there seems endless, especially between the two chief gangs, the Fast Guns and the Varados, an incarnation of the Spaldings.

But there was a clear genesis; the first deadly flash of a blade in the tussle between two dominant gangs.

In modern-day movie parlance, this is the origin story of Westbury’s gang violence.

Decades may have passed since then, but these players of old are still remembered, often by tales well exaggerated. But there is still a palpable fear and almost everybody who agreed to speak to me did so on the condition they weren’t named.

Back then everybody was known by their nicknames and often people learned the real names of their friends only when they appeared in court.

Nowadays the nicknames of old are conferred on young gangsters like a badge of honour.

This is also a tale of a friendship so strong that one of the two murder accused chose to lie for loyalty rather than tell the truth that might possibly have saved his life, if not set him free.

The execution date for Adams and Stuurman was set on November 14 and they were quickly transferred to the Pot, the section of death cells where thousands of condemned men waited out their final days.

The two friends had escaped the rope twice before with late stays of execution, but this time their attorney was unable to spring an 11th hour rescue.

The first reprieve had come the day before their scheduled execution on May 5 1983 and the second a mere seven hours before a December 1 1983 appointment with death.

On the first occasion they had convinced a judge that there was new evidence to be presented in their defence; the second after their desperate mothers, Marjory Adams and Mary Stuurman, had door-stopped the then-minister of justice at his official residence in Pretoria.

An attempt to win a retrial, based on the new evidence, had been dismissed in October 1984. Botha, who had become the country’s first executive state president in September, 1984, rejected their appeal for clemency, which was communicated by the department of justice on November 14.

The beginnings of Western township

Adams and Stuurman were in their twenties, but for residents of Westbury, especially gangsters, longevity was not guaranteed.

Gang violence was a way of life that permeated the streets and homes. Not even the opening up of sport racially and carrying realistic dreams of challenging for a world title could break Adams and Desmond Stuurman free of the gravitational pull of the frenzied feuding in Western, as Westbury used to be called.

It had started out as Western Native Township, even though the area was already referred to as Westbury as far back as 1937, when plans were first announced for a local train station.

Around the same time Johannesburg set aside 294,000 pounds for a coloured housing scheme in the adjacent Coronation township, which was renamed Coronationville two years later.

Newclare and Noordgesig, also close by, were black areas. In 1928 a black kid named only as Benjamin was hospitalised after breaking both his left arm and leg when he was tackled heavily in a game of rugby in Newclare.

Jake Tuli, the first great black South Africa boxer, who made his way overseas and lifted the Empire flyweight title in 1952 before losing a 10-round humdinger to future world champion Robert Cohen a year later, lived in Noordgesig.

But suburbs were racially rearranged after the National Party set about putting its segregation plans into practice in the 1950s and 1960s. Black residents were bundled out of Sophiatown, Western and neighbouring areas and taken to Meadowlands in Soweto.

Many coloured families were affected by forced removals too, literally being thrown across the main road from Sophiatown into Western, where the street names were still black.

The death of little Jane Mary

Some black residents changed their surnames so they could stay on in the new coloured townships.

Eric Sibasa, an employee at Transvaal Envelope Manufacturers who lived at 1275 Tladi Street, Western, posted a notice in the Rand Daily Mail in 1967 stating that he wanted to take his mother’s surname, Pepping, arguing his mother had cared for him most of his life since his parents had divorced.

In September 1965 nine-year-old Jane Mary Geanneret was knocked over and killed in a hit-and-run by the driver of a black Opel on the Newlands main road, the boundary between white and so-called non-white. She was buried at Newclare cemetery on a Sunday.

Her heartbroken parents Bertie and Sophie, who lived at 1798 Tladi Street, put a notice in the paper offering a reward for any information about the accident. It’s not known if they ever found the culprit.

The notices of her death were among the first mentions of Western Coloured Township in the digital archives of this newspaper group. The first mention appeared in the Sunday Times in March 1963, a death notice for a man called Albert Jafta.

The tragedy and senselessness of little Jane’s death was almost a portent for the many teens and young men who were to die violently on the streets of Westbury, Newclare, Coronationville, Bosmont and Noordgesig.

Many believe the gang violence that erupted in the following decade was the by-product of cramming too many people into too small an area with insufficient recreational spaces.

Mixed race sport begins in South Africa

Add to that the economic disadvantages heaped onto the residents, all deemed inferior within the National Party’s system of racial hierarchy.

Despite the hurdles they faced, Adams and Desmond Stuurman, teammates at the Bull & Bush boxing club in Western (before it moved to Bosmont), qualified for the SA Games held over March and April.

It was the first such games to be staged since the “multinational” sports policy outlined by prime minister BJ Vorster in 1971.

The first SA Games took place in 1964 with a comically doomed opening ceremony at the Wanderers, attended by the first state president of white supremacism, Blackie Swart.

It was something of a climbdown following Vorster’s fiasco over cricketer Basil D’Oliveira, the former South African coloured who had been picked to play for England on a cricket tour of South Africa.

In September 1968 Vorster had threatened to block the tour if D’Oliveira was selected, so the English retaliated by cancelling the trip.

That pretty much signalled the beginning of cricket’s international isolation. Apart from a four-Test tour by Australia in 1970, South Africa was in the international wilderness until late 1991.

The crux of the new sports policy allowed touring teams to select players of colour to avoid a repeat of the D’Oliveira debacle.

Local sportsmen of colour, however, were allowed only to compete against other South African race groups nationally. Competing provincially or locally was not included in this dispensation and playing with each other on the same teams was out of the question.

The springbok was the national sporting symbol for all sports, but rugby was exempt from this limited racial blurring, with the white Springbok side being considered too powerful for the race groups.

Golf tees off first

It was little more than window-dressing, but it loosened the lid enough for the genie to plan his escape route.

Golf was the first sport to play under these new rules, in November 1971, with black American Lee Elder coming out to compete at a mixed-race tournament, sponsored by Louis Luyt, at Huddle Park.

Local black players like Vincent Tshabalala also took part and perhaps what set this event apart was that black and white spectators mingled as they followed players around the course. Even the seating in the makeshift stands were not racially reserved and everyone used the same facilities, including drinking at the clubhouse pub.

Two days later athletics followed at Green Point Stadium in Cape Town.

The SA Games were South Africa’s answer to being thrown out of the Olympics ahead of Tokyo 1964, the start of the country’s isolation that lasted seven Games and 32 years.

Flame of segregation goes out

The first SA Games took place in 1964 with a comically doomed opening ceremony at the Wanderers, attended by the first state president of white supremacism, Blackie Swart.

The torch, which had been lit at the symbolic eternal flame at the Voortrekker monument, went out as it was being transported to the venue. Then an attempt to relight it set the upholstery of the car alight.

The second edition of the Games, in Bloemfontein in 1969, was another all-white affair and is best remembered because of the standout performance of karateka Glen Popham, who should have won a Springbok blazer until it turned out that he was actually coloured.

He lived in Coronationville, but his mother resided in Fordsburg, a mixed area at the time, and he used her address which had been sufficient to quell curious eyebrows from racial purists.

The Springbok who never was

His close friends knew the truth and on the few occasions that questions were asked, they told people he was Lebanese. Travelling alone on the bus, he was once chased out of the coloured section and told to sit up front with the whites by a conductor.

The top three-placed South Africans at the games, which included international entrants, were to be awarded Springbok blazers, awarded only to white sports people back then.

The Bloemfontein city council even had to change bylaws to allow coloured folk to enter the sports venues as spectators. Popham, however, stood in the limelight, receiving a standing ovation from the crowds at the Jim Fouche high school as he finished second overall behind Briton Terry O’Neill.

Straight after the individual tournament Popham then captained a Springbok team against a British outfit, though he withdrew injured early on.

Everyone was oblivious to what was going on, but some over-officious administrator responsible for awarding Springbok blazers questioned Popham’s race after the tournament.

It was the first time he was being asked this question by officialdom.

Popham opted to turn down the blazer without admitting that he had competed illegally, explaining that he was emigrating and therefore wouldn’t want the award. He didn’t actually leave the country, keeping a low profile for a while before returning to the sport regularly.

In 1971 he was exposed in a newspaper article as being coloured and after that he started a nonracial organisation.

Popham participated at the 1973 games as an official, but that was seen as collaboration and he was expelled from his organisation.

The talented Desmond Stuurman

Boxers of colour at the ’73 Games didn’t enjoy equal representation among the officials and the bias towards white fighters quickly became a talking point.

Mzukisi Skweyiya won his first two fights on knockout to reach the flyweight final. “It’s the only way to win,” commented Charles Sabayeni, one of the black trainers at the tournament.

Light-flyweight Abednigo Mkhize dropped Piet van Vuuren with a left hook in the opening round and dominated the second round as well, but he lost the fight after fading in the third round.

The first fighter of colour to record a points win over a white fighter in that tournament was Desmond Stuurman. He convincingly beat policeman Johnny Collins, though one of the three judges still gave it to the beaten pugilist.

Stuurman, just 18 at the time, made it to the final where he faced another policeman, Leon Weitz, a five-time white national champion who was considered lucky to have received the decisions in his two previous fights, both against black fighters.

Weitz, in his mid-twenties, had won the white crown four years in a row from 1967 to 1970. He lost it in 1971, but recaptured it again in September 1972.

Stuurman was a naturally talented sportsman. He was a tremendous soccer player and even at gymnastics he performed manoeuvres that left his peers in awe. Even today they still talk about how he could do a triple backward somersault on a trampoline and would occasionally perform flick flacks while walking down the street.

Gangster versus policeman

As a boxer Stuurman was well-rounded, able to fight on the front foot or on the retreat.

He was also the type of fighter to keep his opponents guessing — if he slipped a punch and came back with a particular combination, say a right uppercut followed by a left hook, the next time he slipped he would deliver a different combination.

Stuurman versus Weitz would have been a professional promoter’s dream. First, it was a classic showdown between the aggressive Stuurman and the slick boxer, Weitz.

But it had another, deeper significance because this was a clash between cop and gangster.

And Stuurman wasn’t just any gangster, he was leader of the Spaldings, one of the two major gangs of Western at the time.

• The second instalment of the five-part series 'WILD WESTERN: The rise of Westbury’s gangs' will be published on Thursday.