I was a child but I have a distinct memory of May Day 1989 when the news of David Webster's death came over the radio. Webster, an anthropologist and academic, was shot by a then unknown gunman outside his home in Troyeville, Johannesburg, in front of his partner, Maggie Friedman.
His death sent shockwaves through the liberal anti-apartheid community - though it was known that he was involved in several human-rights and anti-apartheid activities through his work with the Detainees' Parents Support Committee and other organisations, Webster was a gentle but determinedly righteous man, not a firebrand or militant revolutionary.
I never met him but my parents were the kind of liberal-minded regime-opposed ideologues who had friends who had known him well, and I have another vague memory of seeing him on stage as the master of ceremonies at an event featuring the participation of his fellow Wits University anthropology colleague, Johnny Clegg, a few days before Webster's death.
It was soon after the images of Webster's house at 13 Eleanor Street in Troyeville and his mass struggle-hero funeral had been splashed on the front pages of liberal newspapers and magazines like the Weekly Mail, New Nation and Vrye Weekblad that a picture of another man began to emerge. This man: mullet-haired, sallow-eyed, towering, built like a brick shithouse, dressed in stonewashed denim, sporting white high-top tekkies, was someone familiar to many who may have spent their time in the nightclubs and brothels of Hillbrow and Yeoville in the late '80s and '90s but was unknown to most South Africans.
His name was Ferdi Barnard, the son of a decorated policeman, who had joined the police in the early '80s, served as a narcotics agent before being sentenced to jail for the murder of two drug dealers and then emerged out of prison - surprisingly early - as a member of the military's super-secret death squad, the Civil Co-operation Bureau (CCB). He was the man who, it was widely rumoured, had pulled the trigger of the shotgun that had ended Webster's life.
LIES, LIES AND MORE LIES
Barnard would spend much of the next decade being questioned and lying about his involvement in the assassination of Webster before finally being convicted of the murder in 1998. Through several inquests, including an appearance at the Harms commission and even during his eventual murder trial, Barnard would not admit any involvement in the killing of Webster - eventually being sentenced mostly on the basis of testimony from his ex-wife, girlfriends and journalist Jacques Pauw.
Following the killing, Barnard had joined the ranks of a fearsome list of bogeymen whose faces began to populate the pages of newspapers in the '90s - men like former Vlakplaas commanders Dirk Coetzee, Eugene de Kock and operative Joe Mamasela - but there was something significantly different about his story.
Unlike those apartheid assassins who claimed that their murderous actions were conducted for political reasons in the service of an ideology in which they firmly believed, and who had committed themselves to the apartheid regime's mantra of total onslaught, Barnard seemed nothing more than a gangster, motivated by money and offering his services to anyone who would pay him.
His associates were men like Eugene Riley, Corrie Goosen and Barnard's blood brother, former provincial rugby player, policeman and CCB operative Calla Botha. Barnard - the once-righteous drugs officer who had killed two drug dealers - was now a renowned crackhead and the unpredictable, dangerously violent, self-lauded king of Johannesburg's underworld who bragged openly about his involvement with the CCB and described to Pauw how Webster had flown through the air when he had shot him on that fateful May Day morning in 1989.
A LIST OF NAMES
The version of events that emerged during his trial was that Barnard had received from his CCB handlers a list of names of people to watch - these included Dullah Omar, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and David Webster - and that he had picked Webster as a target for elimination on his own initiative in an effort to impress his bosses and score a significant cash bonus for his efforts. Instead of being punished for his overenthusiasm, Barnard had been rewarded by the CCB with a R60,000 bonus.
He remained at large throughout the better part of a decade until finally he was arrested and convicted of the murder in 1998. In 2000, Barnard went before the amnesty committee of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) and gave his version of events, beginning with an admission that:
"For the last 12 to 15 years I have been lying nonstop, under oath, not under oath, it was part of my daily existence. Firstly as a result of the activities that I was involved in, it would happen that one could not tell the truth about anything. Everything that one said, with every day, would be a lie, one would lead a double life. That is how it developed. That for the protection of myself and the defence force and the government and so that my activities could not be traced back to me with various judicial commissions of inquiry, including the Goldstone commission and the formal post mortem inquest into the death of David Webster and my criminal trial and also before the Harms commission, everything with the exception of my name and address was a lie. It was either fraud or the truth that was completely twisted. We all lied and when I say we, I say I and the defence force for whom I worked."
He went on to detail how his former CCB bosses, Joe Verster and Lafras Luitingh, had met him at a flat in the Ponte building in Johannesburg and told him that the elimination of Webster was a priority. He, in collaboration with Calla Botha, had then come up with a plan to kill the mild-mannered anthropologist who Barnard had been convinced was a terrorist and a threat to the state.
In spite of Barnard admitting his involvement and naming those who had given him the orders, and his accomplice, no further investigation was conducted by the TRC or the National Prosecuting Authority into his claims. Today, Verster, Luitingh, Botha and former CCB boss Staal Burger continue their lives without ever having been called to account for their supposed involvement in Webster's death.
A GANGSTER AMONG US
Unlike his former associate and convicted murderer Eugene de Kock, Barnard's testimony did not lead to a frantic flurry of amnesty applications, and while De Kock was known to have given assistance to several families of his victims during his time in jail before his eventual parole in 2016, little had been heard of Barnard until last month when minister of justice Michael Masutha announced that he had granted Webster's killer parole.
Barnard was released from Kgosi Mampuru II prison in Pretoria on Tuesday morning and, while the rest of the 61-year-old's life will be served under parole restrictions, in effect one of Johannesburg's most notorious gangsters and killers now walks among us.
That doesn't mean you're likely to see the grey-haired, gaunt shadow of the former bogeyman at your neighbourhood supermarket or local drinking hole but it does raise a serious question about why, if as he claimed, Barnard was only the executor of an order from his CCB bosses, they continue to be unaccountable for their role in the events that led to the murder of Webster.
It's all very well that you might see a mosaic memorial to Webster at 13 Eleanor Street in Troyeville and see his name emblazoned on a residence at Wits University, but if we are still to believe the contract on which the TRC was established, then it is ludicrous that men like Verster, Burger, Luitingh and Botha continue to avoid having to answer any questions.
Whether or not Barnard has actually reformed or rehabilitated, found God, remarried and has no possibility of returning to his gangster ways seems irrelevant to the bigger issue of why the men who utilised his underworld connections and reputation to their nefarious advantage have not been called to account.
Even Maggie Friedman, Webster's partner who watched his body fly through the air on the pavement outside their home and who went to the TRC asking that those who had given Barnard his orders be brought to book, has reconciled herself to the fact of Barnard's parole. In answer to questions from the Sunday Times last week, Friedman said that though she "spent 10 years trying to keep the issue of David's unresolved assassination alive" and that when "Barnard was finally convicted I found a huge sense of relief and release", she then "decided that this was the end of the fight for me and I didn't want my life to be constantly in the shadow of this dreadful experience".
"While I could not and did not want to pretend it hadn't happened, my priorities changed and l let it go and that felt like a victory.
"My advice for those in similar circumstances would be to do what you feel you have to do. Once you feel you don't, let it go and pay attention to your own life."
Jacques Pauw, who knew Barnard well in the late '90s and wrote extensively about him, admits that he does not know who Ferdi Barnard is in 2019. "Has he been rehabilitated? I don't know. The parole board certainly think he is fit to go … he might well be a sociopath, who knows?
"He is around 60 years old now and hopefully wisdom has come with age. I hope he disappears into obscurity and I never hear from him again."
I never want to hear from Ferdi Barnard but there's part of me that can't help feeling that the best thing for all of us would be that he still be behind bars and that those who gave him his orders be right next to him in the cells of Kgosi Mampuru II...