The long-forgotten assassin of Verwoerd
Between the time of his assassination of the architect of apartheid on the sixth of September 1966 and his death 33 years later, few people in South Africa, let alone the rest of the world, knew anything of Dimitris Tsafendas. At his trial, every detail of the clearly deranged court messenger’s life was exposed to the public – from the tapeworm in his belly that he believed had dictated his actions to the way he held the knife as he stabbed Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd to death in Parliament. And then, with the judge’s declaration that he could not judge Tsafendas «any more than I can judge a dog,» the assassin disappeared as if he had never existed, spending a lifetime in South Africa’s grim prisons and dying in a psychiatric hospital in October 1999. At his pauper’s burial in the town of Krugersdorp, the only friend at Tsafendas’s graveside was a fellow patient, Nasheem Wilson, who had walked miles to attend the ceremony. «There were supposed to be millions of friends here. I don’t know what happened,» Wilson said. Tsafendas, in his tortured mind, had regretted killing Verwoerd, but he also felt that he was part of a greater struggle, that what he had done was significant historically. Other than Wilson, no one else thought so. At the time of his death, before the publication of the Dutch novelist Henk van Woerden’s biography, very few people knew Tsafendas’s name and the long, strange story of his life. Not even the staff of the mental hospital in which he died. The system could not condemn him to death, nor could it forgive him. It made sure that it forgot him. Apart from a brief reference in the Afrikaner poet Breyten Breytenbach’s prison memoir in the late 1980s – in which he described Tsafendas as singing loudly, for hours on end, in his cell in Pretoria Central Prison – there was no news of Verwoerd’s assassin, there were no photographs, there were none of the anniversaries that are customary after events that marked a nation’s history. But South Africa was not a normal country in any sense. For three decades after his assassination, Verwoerd’s grand system of apartheid was adhered to religiously by his heirs as if nothing had changed. Tsafendas’s act and disappearance were, to the handful who remembered him, a fitting metaphor for the sickness of their society. It took a madman to kill the architect of a sick system which no sane person should have tolerated. It was a very sick system that closed over the countless lives that were destroyed by apartheid, like an apple’s glossy skin hiding the worms in its innards. Apartheid in South Africa was not only the political system in which the white minority kept the black majority at arm’s length as if it were in another country, exploiting it according to its whims and needs. For those who lived in that beautiful, sunny country, it was also a cold, totalitarian mist that cast its dark wings over everything, leaving nothing untouched. The only news that South Africans heard was the news that the censors allowed. The only parties they could vote for – when they were among the franchised – were those that the government allowed. But not only newspapers, books and parties were proscribed. Even people could be eliminated, as if they were objects that could cease to exist legally. They might be killed, jailed, or, in a uniquely refined form of house arrest, be «banned» – in which case their words might not be quoted, they were not allowed to move about and they could not meet with more than one person at a time. The government used a vast bureaucracy and security apparatus to control everyone and everything within the country’s tightly controlled borders. Although South Africa would proclaim that it was the last bastion of the West, the country resembled a totalitarian regime – albeit with a Californian lifestyle for members of the white minority, as long as they did not cross the dividing lines set by the system’s many laws. (Even Tsafendas’s family, and the Greeks in general, were not held accountable for his actions, as would have been the case in other regimes, once it was determined that they were not part of a conspiracy.) The system classified everyone according to race. This would then determine where he or she would live, with whom they could have sex, whom they would marry, what schools they and their children would attend, whether they would be allowed to travel, what kind of work they could have, what kind of property they could own and whether they could vote. In one of the greatest but least publicized of apartheid’s many crimes, amply illustrating the grandeur of the regime’s delusions, millions of black people were uprooted from their ancestral homes and moved to barren plains so that the government could wipe out «black spots» on the map. It was no wonder that the system could tolerate no mention of Dimitris Tsafendas. He broke just about every rule set down by the men who ran apartheid. He slipped through every safety net. And then, in what might have appeared as a singularly bizarre form of divine justice, the troubled loner struck through the heart of the system, butchering Hendrik Verwoerd in the very seat in the Parliament that turned his illusions of racial purity into legislation. Born to a Cretan father and a black woman in Mozambique in 1918, Dimitris Tsafendas was neither white nor black, relegating him to the limbo that South Africa’s racists called «Colored.» Although he was classified «White» because his complexion was not altogether black and his family was Greek, shortly before the assassination Tsafendas requested from the South African authorities that he be reclassified «Colored.» The apparent reason was that he wanted to be close to a «Colored» woman friend. Unlike most South Africans, Tsafendas was well-travelled and could speak five languages. The young «Mimis» was sent to live with his father’s mother in Alexandria. From there he was sent back to Mozambique, from where he was sent to boarding school in the small farming town of Middelburg in neighboring South Africa. He fitted in nowhere. He was cut adrift. He worked as a seaman, translator, lathe operator, «professor of English,» hawker and pilgrim, getting into trouble with the law on three continents. Between 1942 and 1963 alone, the period he spent abroad, he was arrested five times. Eight times he was forbidden entry into South Africa. Not only did he manage to get in, but he also applied for and was given a job as a messenger in Parliament. Tsafendas was both a Communist and a Christian. He could be both charismatic and obsessive. And he was obsessed with the Dragon-Tapeworm in his belly. For those who had known Tsafendas before his disappearance, he was an uncomfortable and dangerous presence, a loose cannon, best to be avoided. He was trouble waiting to happen. Strangely, his aimless wanderings and tortured mind led not to some domestic tragedy but to one of the most dramatic assassinations of the 20th century. It was as if the half-black, half-white drifter, driven by his wandering mind, had homed in on the deluded maniac most responsible for trying to impose order on the chaos of human variety. Somehow, the system could not guard itself against everything all the time. In his disturbing and moving reconstruction of Tsafendas’s life, van Woerden has pieced together a biography from 12 cartons of documents gathered by the South African security police, doctors’ reports and conversations with the 80-year-old Tsafendas shortly before his death. An immigrant to South Africa, like Tsafendas and the Dutch-born Verwoerd himself, van Woerden is ideally placed to portray the strange atmosphere of a country in which the worst lunatics were running the asylum. Through skillful reporting and a sensitive portrayal not only of his protagonist but of those around him, van Woerden has cut to the heart of a troubled man and a troubled country, recovering Tsafendas’s lost life before and after the act which put an end to his wandering for ever. We can never know if what Tsafendas did changed the course of South African history for the better or for the worse, or at all. The man and his act were never adopted by those waging the struggle for South Africa’s eventual liberation, ignoring this untidy detail of their history just as the Afrikaners had. Even history books describe him as a nameless «white parliamentary messenger.» What we do know now is that the «man who killed Verwoerd» was a man whose tale would have been the stuff of a great novel, if it were not all true. And the telling of his tale is the granting of his last wish, that his belly be opened and the Dragon-Tapeworm «exposed to the eyes of science at last.» Van Woerden has done that for a country, with the cool scalpel of his art. Nikos Konstandaras wrote this introduction for the Greek edition of the book, published by Kedros in 2001, and translated by Joanna Dullaart.
