Desmond Stuurman may have been a gangster, but he was largely respected within the Western community.
When the boss of the Spaldings, nicknamed Twakie, saw an auntie struggling to carry her shopping parcels home, he’d quickly offer to help her.
He was as considerate as he was a talented sportsman. Apart from being an excellent boxer and an agile gymnast, he was a more than useful football player for the Ionians, a local team coached by his father Archie.
But he was still a gangster and he enjoyed to rumble.
Nobody could stand in front of him. On one occasion he and Robbie “Patrys” Adams, a senior member of the opposing Fast Guns gangs, were playing cards, gambling, when Patrys made a comment Stuurman didn’t take kindly to.
Nobody heard what it was but Stuurman responded with his fists and he took Patrys apart.
Stuurman wore a rudimentary tattoo across his chest, a giant S intersected by two diagonal flagpoles each carrying blank swallow-tailed pennants, the tips of which almost touched his nipples.
The word SPALDING was tattooed on top, curving up then down again and fitting between the tops of the flag poles; underneath, curving down then up, was SYNDICATE.
On the front of his right shoulder was a large U and on the left shoulder a large A, making USA with S on his chest. American brandnames were popular.
The Spaldings had started out as a social club, some say, with members being snappy dressers.
Spalding was a sports label and their golf clubs were said to be their weapon of choice.
The Fast Guns, the other main gang in the area, were named for the Western movie The Last of the Fast Guns, though some argue it came from a local soccer hero, called Robbie Myburgh, who was nicknamed Fast Gun due to his speed on the pitch. Myburgh also happened to be a member of the Fast Guns.
There were also smaller outfits, like the Vultures, whose members were more easily identifiable by the tattoos of birds they wore on their faces, and the Vikings, reportedly the oldest gang in the area.
There is an opinion that the Spaldings and Fast Guns arose from supporters of local soccer clubs, with the Ionians linked to the Spaldings and Chesterfield to the Fast Guns.
In the early 1970s gang warfare meant factions standing on opposite sides of a road and throwing stones at each other.
If a bus pulled up to drop off adults returning from work or shopping, they’d stop and wait for the vehicle to drive away and the people to walk off before continuing.
Vikkie Fly
It was fairly innocuous, but that changed one Tuesday night, on February 1 1972.
Abie Johnson returned from work to the home he shared with his grandmother, Catherine Woodhouse, on Fetsha Street around 6.30pm.
Soon afterwards Errol Phillips and another friend, Victor Felix, better known in Western as Vikkie Fly, came calling. They hung around for a while and about 8.30pm Phillips and Felix left.
Johnson followed a few minutes later, catching a lift with Phillips in his Volkswagen Beetle. Felix left them, but they picked up Stuurman and Oscar “Gold” Rodgers and went driving down Makoela Street in search of petrol.
Stuurman was in the passenger seat of the two-door car with Rodgers and Johnson in the back.
They turned into another road and as they approached a cafe they were confronted by 11 Fast Gun members standing in the road, some armed with pangas and others with Okapi knives.
Charlie Stevens stepped into the path of the car and held up the panga in his one hand and raised the other, instructing them to stop. With the other 10 gangsters lining the road, including Fast Guns leader Richard “Fellas” Timmerman, Phillips obliged.
'We want to kill Oscar'
Twakie recognised them all instantly. He boxed with Stevens, an excellent goalkeeper who went on to play for Orlando Pirates while his cousin Aladin Stevens went on to achieve fame as the longest-serving South African lightweight champion, holding the belt in five reigns from 1982 to 1992.
Stuurman had also played football with some of the others in the group and had gone to school with the rest.
He opened the passenger door and lifted himself up on the door, keeping his feet in the car. “What’s going on?” he asked.
Stevens replied that they wanted Rodgers, who was seated behind Stuurman.
As Stuurman engaged Stevens, Abel Dajee, at 20 the second oldest of the 11, approached the car from the other side and opened the driver’s door.
Phillips, known more for his fashion sense than an ability to fight, got out to try to find out what was happening. Dajee insisted they didn’t have a problem with him. At that point Phillips overheard Stevens telling Stuurman that they wanted to kill Rodgers.
Stuurman challenges them all
Stuurman climbed back into the car, closed and locked the door, rolled up the window and told Rodgers to stay in the car. Then he climbed across the front seats and exited the car on the driver’s side.
Dajee turned to Johnson in the back, telling him to get out. Johnson, who had been sitting behind the driver, stood up, leaning on the door to block the path to Rodgers.
Dajee, whose brother Ishmael became leader of the Fast Guns many years later, continued talking to Phillips, explaining that Rodgers had stabbed him in the arm during an altercation at the same cafe earlier in the day. Rodgers had also kicked at Stevens, he said.
Rodgers denied this in court later, though his testimony in general was considered untrustworthy by the trial judge, Cecil Margo, a former World War 2 bomber pilot who had been appointed to the bench the previous year.
Phillips asked Dajee to leave Rodgers, but the Fast Guns wanted revenge.
Stuurman had also asked that they leave Rodgers, and again they declined. Then, unarmed, he approached each of the gangsters one by one and asked if they wanted to fight him.
None of them took up the offer, insisting their target was Rodgers.
At this point Johnson was seen as the major obstacle to them getting to Rodgers and their patience was thinning. Barbs started getting tossed around.
Robert Matthews, the oldest of the crew at 24, and Johnson had a history.
The blade of Henry Ford
Matthews had previously caused trouble with a girl and then told her his name was Abie Johnson. “Don’t think you can catch a girl and say you’re Abie Johnson,” the Spalding told him.
“Let’s drag this dog out and stab him instead,” responded Matthews, who pulled the door open as Brian Matthews, his cousin, grabbed Johnson around the neck and pulled him out of the car.
Before Stuurman could intervene, Henry Ford, one of the Fast Gun stalwarts and also a talented sportsman, stabbed the deceased in the back.
Rodgers, seeing the chaos unfold, leapt out the car on the passenger side and ran for his life. The Fast Guns spotted him and most of them gave chase, except for Stevens, who had remained on the passenger side of the vehicle.
Johnson slumped to his knees, blood flowing heavily down his back. Phillips and Stuurman put him in the car and raced to Coronation Hospital.
He was alive when they dropped him off at casualty and they headed home to tell his grandmother he had been stabbed. He died before she could get to him.
Less than 48 hours later, on February 3, Catherine Woodhouse went to the state mortuary to identify the body of her grandchild.
Seeking revenge
The first blood in inter-gang violence in Westbury had been spilt and Stuurman was furious. He went looking for Ford, arriving at his house later that night brandishing a handgun.
He found Ford’s grandmother and younger brother, Albert, who had been among the 11 attackers at the scene.
Albert was a member of the Vultures and he had the tattoo to prove it, even though he was the youngest there, having turned 16 that day.
They told Stuurman they didn’t know the whereabouts of Henry, who was staying with a friend.
Testifying in court Stuurman was pretty solid describing the events around the attack on Johnson, but after that his evidence became sketchy.
He denied going to the Ford house, but admitted he had found a gun after a run-in with two Fast Guns, one of them being Myburgh, the soccer player dubbed Fast Gun. Myburgh and his accomplice had chased him and Phillips on foot, then somehow the two Spaldings started chasing the two rivals.
Something fell out of one their pockets — Stuurman couldn’t tell whose — and when he picked it up he noticed it was a revolver.
A pact for blood
The next day he took it to Brixton police station, where he handed it over to Detective-Sgt Cecil Studdard, whose son, as fate would have it, ended up marrying one of Cameron Adams’ sisters.
The 11 were charged, though only nine were convicted, with two defendants supplying alibis that created sufficient doubt in Margo’s mind.
The testimony of Stuurman and Phillips had been important. Other witnesses considered important were police captain Piet Byleveld and Lemmy Trenton, a local resident who spoke about the operations of the Fast Guns.
It turned out “Koshen” Trenton was also a Spalding and this case showed gangsters they didn’t have to fight only on the streets — they could use the courts as well.
But that wasn’t the end of it. There was also the matter of street justice.
One immediate but little known aftermath of Johnson’s death was that two boys, one a relative and both of them younger than 10, made a pact to avenge his killing one day.
Gangs first hit the press
Johnson’s death wasn’t reported in the newspapers of this group that have been digitally archived, but the first mention of the gangs appeared a week after the killing in an unrelated incident.
Standard Eight pupil Mark Booykie Adrian, just 15, was stabbed to death on his way to Coronationville High School on the morning of February 8, after being attacked between the St Theresa Convent and the Coloured and Indian Blind Association’s building.
He had been assaulted a couple of times in the previous year or so, his watch being stolen just a week earlier.
Abe Domingo, a civic leader, said he and other leading figures in the community including poet and activist Don Mattera, Dr Cliffie Smith and Steve Farrah had appealed to the police commissioner in the area to take action against the rising crime.
“He promised to do something about gangsters like the Fast Guns and the Spaldings. A man was murdered in my shop more than a year ago. A report was made, but nothing has come of it to this day,” he told the Rand Daily Mail. “It is clear gangsters are running riot in the townships, but it seems nothing can be done about it.”
Adrian’s funeral was marked by a protest that first made its way to the Bosmont Catholic Church for the service before continuing to Croesus Cemetery.
Murder charge upon murder charge
Five months later 19-year-old Jamalie Hendricks, one of the 11 accused still awaiting trial for Johnson’s killing, was arrested for a second killing.
He had been at the discotheque at the Bosmont Hotel on a Wednesday night when he caused trouble with another patron, Steven Witbooi, who complained to management.
Hendricks was told to leave, but he didn’t go further than the main door of the premises and a guard, Solomon Mkhize, who worked for Johannesburg Patrols, a subsidiary of Springbok, told him to hop it.
According to Hendricks, as he turned to leave Mkhize hit him across his back with his kerrie. Hendricks whipped around, knife in hand, and lunged at his right shoulder, but the blade instead went into the bouncer’s neck, slicing an artery.
Hendricks ran away as Mkhize stumbled into the hotel’s ground-floor lounge where he collapsed on the floor, blood spurting from the wound. He died before help could arrive.
Hendricks ended up being acquitted, but he served time for his part in Johnson’s death.
International stars at the SA Games
Some 13 months after Johnson’s murder, Stuurman and Adams competed at the SA Games, the apartheid government’s answer to being thrown out of the Olympics.
International competitors had been invited across several sporting codes, including some medallists from Munich 1972, including the West German champion men’s hockey side.
Rudolph Dollinger of Austria, who had placed third at the Olympics, won the free pistol shooting, beating Munich champion Ragnar Skanåker, who was banned for four months for defying a warning by his home Swedish federation.
Another Swede, fencer Kerstin Palm, faced the same suspension and chose not to compete.
The boxing tournament didn’t feature major international names, but sitting at ringside was Germany’s former world heavyweight champion Max Schmeling, watching a handful of future stars who would go on to shine in the paid ranks.
Nobody knew it then, but even with world sports bodies increasingly shunning South Africa, professional boxing was about to go in the opposite direction and open up to the country, a move that also benefited black fighters.
Boxing bucks trend of isolation
By that point in time only three South Africans had challenged for world titles — Vic and Willie Toweel in the 1950s and Willie Ludick in 1968. In those days nobody really regarded Willie Smith, who won the British recognition of the world bantamweight title in 1927.
In early 1973 Pierre Fourie was about to take on world light-heavyweight king Bob Foster twice that year, with the return being the first professional mixed-race bout in South Africa in December 1973.
In November Arnold Taylor got off the canvas four times to lift the WBA bantamweight crown at the Rand stadium, becoming the first South African world champion since Vic Toweel 21 years earlier.
By the end of the decade four more South Africans would take the total number of title cracks for the decade to 10, including the first two black contenders — Norman “Pangaman” Sekgapane in 1978 and Nkosana “Happy Boy” Mgxaji in 1979.
The first black South African to win a world title, in 1980, was Peter Mathebula, who was a stablemate of Adams in the late 1970s.
The biggest challenge of all was the last big bout of the 1970s, when Gerrie Coetzee took on American John Tate for the WBA heavyweight crown that had been vacated by Muhammad Ali at Loftus Versfeld on October 20 1979.
Heavyweight stars of the Games
This rise in world title action was no coincidence, with the South African boxing commission having gone on a charm offensive and winning favour with the US-based World Boxing Association (WBA).
From 1980 to 1987 there were another 12 challenges, including Coetzee’s successful third tilt at the WBA heavyweight title held by Michael Dokes in 1983.
Coetzee, just 17, made the heavyweight final at the 1973 Games, losing on points to Kallie Knoetze, who also became a world-ranked professional, losing to Tate in the semifinals of the fight-off for Ali’s old mantle.
Opportunities were there for the class of ’73, though the games tournament was marred by the racial prejudice of the white judges. Fighters of colour took only one of the 11 crowns on offer.
Eastern Cape star Mzukisi Skweyiya had to settle for the flyweight silver against Gregory Wagner.
Biased judging
Skweyiya went on to enjoy an impressive professional career, winning the black South African bantamweight crown and building up an unbeaten record of 21 wins and a draw before his activism against apartheid forced him into exile, ending what might have been one of the greatest local ring careers of all time.
Those who saw him in action rated him above Mgxaji, widely considered the finest product of the Eastern Cape.
“Some of the black boxers are real good material,” noted Schmeling. “They have big hearts and ambition, but most of them still lack the know-how. Anyway, some of the decisions were bad.”
The only fighter of colour to win a crown at the ’73 games was lightweight Moses Khoni, who outpointed Eddie Mileham, the white champion at that weight.
Khoni turned professional later that year but after seven wins and three losses he quit the ring.
Adams faced Apie Smith in the welterweight final, but he was disqualified in the opening round for holding.
As a professional Adams went on to win Fight of the Year in 1979 for his five-round war against Bruce McIntyre and in 1980 he took the Transvaal middleweight crown.
Lanky with a heavy punch, Adams, nicknamed Kangaroo, had talent. Whenever he fought the Western fans shouted the refrain, “Roo will do it for you in two”, and he often obliged.
His roadwork route used to take him up the steep hill past the SABC headquarters in Auckland Park, but he wasn’t the most dedicated of boxers.
Adams was easily distracted and violence and vengeance were greater attractions.
Desmond Stuurman, the Spaldings boss, went after the elusive Weitz, the policeman, for three rounds of what was described as an even fight, but the judges gave it to the white guy.
Whether Stuurman deserved to lose or not, his performance against the five-time white South African champion was impressive.
The country had two fine featherweight prospects, but before the end of 1974 both would be dead, their lives cut short in the line of their respective duties.
• The third instalment of the five-part series 'WILD WESTERN: The rise of Westbury’s gangs' will be published on Friday.
Read: Chapter 1: Gangsters and boxers of Westbury | Til death did they part
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.