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.

His doctorate had been written on a traditional topic of anthropology (kinship), but it was focused on a politically explosive field, namely migrant workers from Mozambique.

[2][3] Webster was shot dead outside his house at 13 Eleanor Street in Troyeville, Johannesburg, by assassins in the employ of the Civil Cooperation Bureau, a clandestine agency of the apartheid state.

Ferdi Barnard, the man who pulled the trigger on the shotgun used, was later tried and found guilty in 1998; he was sentenced to two life terms plus 63 years for a number of crimes, including the murder of Webster.