In South Africa, the anthropologist David Webster is part of a constellation of biographies that have become symbols of the fight against apartheid. He was murdered on Labor Day, on the street of his residence, by Ferdi Barnard, a feared member of the clandestine paramilitary group known as the “Civil Cooperation Bureau.” Webster was a charismatic college professor in the Department of Anthropology at Wits and a prominent activist, likely affiliated with the ANC. He founded organizations such as the Johannesburg Democratic Action Committee (JODAC) and led the Detainees' Parents' Support Committee (DPSC), a committee responsible for providing legal, material, and political assistance to political prisoners and their families during the repressive 1980s. Webster is better known in South Africa as a human rights activist than as an anthropologist. However, by analyzing the obituaries and articles after his death that reference his assassination, it is possible to perceive it as a "social event" for the discipline. Anthropologists began to reflect on the values, political commitments, and ethical urgencies that should be assumed by the discipline in the context of the end of apartheid and the recent democratization of the country. The approach I will take in this communication is to examine how anthropologists reflected on Webster's assassination and how this event was expressive of the relationships between politics and anthropology. It sparked a field of debates about the political and social role that anthropology should assume in the context of the end of apartheid, as well as reflections on the political role assumed—or not assumed—by anthropologists. Finally, I believe that the oppositions between styles, meanings, and objectives of anthropological practices that marked the way Webster's assassination was considered continue to be present in how anthropologists describe themselves and think about the history of the discipline.