South Africa hero who changed course of apartheid but got no reward

Two South African newspaper front pages: VERWOERD ASSASSINATED in the Daily Dispatch on the day after his death, and FACE OF THE ASSASSIN in the Rand Daily Mail. FILE PHOTO

What you need to know:

  • Search reference book indexes under T and you are very unlikely to find “Tsafendas, Dimitrio.”
  • His first thought had been to kidnap the prime minister and exchange him for political prisoners, but he knew that was impossible on his own.
  • The truth is that Tsafendas was perfectly sane and acted from profound political conviction.

Fifty years ago, South African Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd, considered the architect of apartheid, was dramatically stabbed to death inside Parliament by a messenger.

His assassin, Dimitrio Tsafendas, was declared insane and his name virtually erased from history in an attempt by the oppressive regime to downplay the political act.

But after years of painstaking research, Sunday Nation’s GERRY LOUGHRAN pieces together the events, and reveals fresh details about the man, his motive and the historical significance of the assassination in this first instalment of a two-part series.

Fifty years ago, at 2.15 on the afternoon of September 6, a stout man in the navy blue messenger’s uniform of the South African parliament, walked up to the Prime Minister’s front bench seat, pulled a two-dollar knife from his belt and stabbed Hendrik Verwoerd to death.

A month and a half later, Judge A.B. Beyers addressed the assassin, who was one-quarter African, and declared, “I can as little try a man who has not got at least the makings of a rational mind as I could try a dog.”

Dimitrio Tsafendas, ruled insane and unfit for trial, was ordered to be detained at the State President’s pleasure.

The truth is that Tsafendas was perfectly sane and acted from profound political conviction. But the apartheid regime could not admit that a Communist who had been arrested five times for subversive activities had evaded official security and secured a job in Parliament.

Worse, it could never acknowledge that serious opposition existed to its oppressive rule. Fearing that execution would make Tsafendas a martyr, the regime staged a massive deception, condemning him to life-long imprisonment and torture and subsequent invisibility.

Tsafendas planned the assassination with care and foresight, considering it to be tyrannicide, that is, the morally justifiable act of killing a tyrant.

His hope was that without the architect of apartheid, South Africa would change, leading to an end of racial separation.
MANY YEARS BEFORE TRANSFORMATION
It was many years before the transformation happened, but The Guardian newspaper of Britain described Tsafendas as the man who “arguably changed the course of post-war South African history more than any other individual.”

Tsafendas himself, however, has virtually disappeared from history.

Anthony Sampson’s monumental Mandela: The Authorised Biography says simply that Verwoerd “was killed by a deranged white messenger.”

An academic history of South Africa refers to “a deranged Parliamentary messenger,” and The New Penguin Encyclopaedia says only that Verwoerd “was assassinated in Cape Town.” Nowhere is he named.

Search reference book indexes under T and you are very unlikely to find “Tsafendas, Dimitrio.”

What is more, Tsafendas has never been honoured by the new, democratic South Africa, and to this day, his grave next to the mental hospital where he died at age 81 remains anonymous, grassed over and without a marker. The rest of the world, including independent Africa, believed the racists’ lie and for fifty years has considered the man who killed Verwoerd to be just a lunatic.

The following article provides crucially revealing information about the least honoured of all of Africa’s independence heroes.

Dimitrio Tsafendas’s father was a Greek engineer, Michalis Tsafantakis, and his mother was one of Michalis’s two housemaids, Amelia Williams, whose own father was a white German and her mother a Mozambican African. They lived in Maputo, then Lourenco Marques, capital of the Portuguese colony of Mozambique.

When Amelia became pregnant, she left her job with Michalis, assuming he would not accept the child, and gave birth to a boy on January 14, 1918 somewhere in Lourenco Marques.

In fact, Michalis had been searching for Amelia since he learned she was pregnant and when he found her, he persuaded her to return with their child. For a few months, they lived together as family.

It was not uncommon at the time for white men to father children by black women, but the children were rarely acknowledged, much less taken into the home.

Marriage, however, was out of the question and it was inevitable that Michalis would eventually take a Greek wife. He therefore asked Amelia to turn the baby over to him, promising that he would be raised as a loved and equal member of his future family.

At first Amelia demurred, but eventually persuaded that it would be best for the child’s future, she agreed and walked away. Her son was six to nine months old. They were never to hold each other again.

Deciding he could not live with his mixed-race son while searching for a Greek wife, Michalis sent the boy to Alexandria, Egypt, where he was lovingly cared for by his own mother, Katerina, and his sister Artemis, for the next six years.

Back home, Michalis found his Greek bride in Marika Sakelis. He did not tell her about his love child, but when Marika began noticing a young half-African woman lingering around their home, trying to peek through the windows, the truth came out: the woman was the mother of his son who lived in Egypt.

Marika was shocked, but accepted that the boy should return home to live as part of their family.

Dimitri, as he was known, was seven when he was brought back to Lourenco Marques to meet his step-mother, who was introduced to him as his mother, and his step-siblings. It was a loving environment and everyone accepted Dimitri as their own flesh and blood.

Other members of the Greek community were less welcoming, aware of his half-African mother, and pointing ot the boy’s tight curly hair and olive skin.

When Dimitri was 10, his father sent him to boarding school in Middleburg, South Africa, believing a Portuguese boy would get a good education in white-ruled South Africa.

Dimitri was happy, extrovert and popular. But in 1930, Michalis ran into financial problems and Dimitri, nearly 13, returned to Mozambique. His formal education was effectively ended. But his relationship with his father flourished.

Michalis was an educated and well-rounded man and though not a Communist, strongly left wing in his political outlook. Wisely in colonial Mozambique, Michalis did not express his opinions in public, unlike his son, a growing teenager with a serious interest in politics, who adopted ever more radical positions and expressed them brashly and injudiciously.

While working at a newspaper kiosk, he denounced a customer, a wealthy Portuguese businessman, as a fascist exploiter of Mozambicans. The man reported him to the Portuguese security police, the PIDE, and the kiosk owner fired him.

This incident dogged Dimitri throughout his life as it led to the creation of a secret file by the Portuguese colonial police force in which he was described as having “Communist leanings.”

TRUTH ABOUT DIMITRI'S BIRTH

Dimitri was 19 when he discovered the truth about his birth.

Seeking a Portuguese passport, he accessed his birth certificate and was shocked to discover that his mother was not Marika but a half-Mozambican woman named Amelia Williams, who had died in 1927.

He tried desperately to learn more about her, at least the location of her grave, but he found no-one who knew her. That he never managed to meet his birth mother pained him for the rest of his life.

About then, Michalis decided that there was no realistic future for him in Mozambique and relocated to South Africa with Marika and their four children, leaving Dimitri behind. He feared that Dimitri’s racial mix and the fact that he was now blacklisted as a suspected Communist would cause problems.

Six months later, Dimitri made his own application for entry to South Africa and received the first of what were to be many refusals, unsurprisingly since the South African authorities possessed a Portuguese police report describing Dimitri as a half-caste with “Communistic leanings.”

By then aged 20, Dimitri decided if he could not get to South Africa legally, he would go illegally. And so he did, probably by hopping a freight train, arriving some time in 1939.

As the threat of war became reality in Europe, Dimitri joined the South African Communist Party, attended public meetings, delivered leaflets and fought in the streets of Johannesburg with white South African supporters of pro-Nazi organisations.

Discovered to be an illegal immigrant, an order went out that Dimitri should be deported to Lourenco Marques forthwith. It came too late.

Five days earlier, on June 13, 1942, Tsafendas left Cape Town as a mess boy on the Greek freighter s.s. Eugene Livathinos. He was 24 and the ship took him to Canada.

* * * * *

Thus began one of the most extraordinary odysseys of modern time, 24 years during which Dimitri Tsafendas lived in or travelled through more than a score of countries. Psychiatrists at Tsafendas’s trial characterised it as “aimless drifting.”

According to Tsafendas, it was “forced globetrotting,” caused by his being banned from the land of his birth, Mozambique, and the country where his family lived, South Africa.

In the face of nine official refusals by South Africa and six by Mozambique, Tsafendas never doubted he would get there eventually.

Concisely, this is the timeline: From 1942 to 1947, Tsafendas served in the US merchant service on Liberty ships carrying war materials to the Allies.

Deported by America to Greece in 1947, he joined the Democratic Army, the military wing of the Greek Communist Party, during the Greek Civil War.

In late 1949, he travelled to Portugal and was arrested and accused of evading military service. He secured his release by feigning madness.

For several months, Tsafendas worked as a maritime salesman, hawking goods to holidaymakers on cruise ships, then in October 1951 travelled to Mozambique but was refused entry. He immediately doubled over, apparently suffering from appendicitis, and was rushed to a hospital, from which he quickly escaped. He was recaptured within weeks and on December 15 released without charge but banned from Mozambique. The exile would last 12 years.

Turning to Europe, he took part in anti-apartheid demonstrations in London, waving a placard of a man in Ku Klux Klan uniform labelled VERWOERD.

In Turkey, he worked for six months teaching English at the best private language college in Istanbul. In West Germany in 1960, he read about the Sharpeville massacre in South Africa and made a vow to “do something” about Verwoerd and suddenly the way was open: In October 1963, he was allowed back into Mozambique.

His step-mother wrote and told him that his father had died and he asked for her help in reuniting with the family and seeing his father’s grave in South Africa.

Marika and three other family members drove north, a South African immigration official in Lourenco Marques took a bribe, and 11 years after his 1942 deportation order, Tsafendas was back in South Africa. Verwoerd had just two years and 10 months left to live.

Five times during Tsafendas’s long exile, when he was jobless and penniless, he admitted himself to hospitals to secure food, warmth and a roof over his head.

To gain admittance, however, he had to convince doctors he was ill and he did this by pretending to be insane. It was a ploy he had used as early as 1943 when he was imprisoned in Bangor, Maine.

Fearing he would be shipped back out and his ship torpedoed by a German submarine, he engineered his release by claiming he could hear voices from the radiators. He used mad acts often thereafter to find a hospital bed or to stop torture in prisons and detention.

His play-acting ranged from pretending to be Saint Peter, the act he staged to avoid Portuguese army service, claiming to hear voices and pulling grotesque faces. His trickery did not always succeed and it was only when he came across a young man named Tom Tuff that he discovered the act which he considered to be a winner – a tapeworm in his stomach.

Tsafendas told friends in later life that he met Tom, a young seaman of part-Irish origin, diagnosed as schizophrenic, in an American hospital. Tom was skinny and always asked for extra rations, claiming that he needed to feed a tapeworm in his stomach. Tsafendas suspected that this was Tom’s way of getting extra food, but he recognised it as a perfect tool for use against the authorities.

Back in South Africa in November 1963, Tsafendas quickly demonstrated that his 21-year exile had done nothing to soften his left-wing opinions.

Described by a friend as “fiercely anti-apartheid,” he frequently and openly denounced Verwoerd as “Hitler’s best student.”

Verwoerd had studied in Germany as a young man and Tsafendas said he copied Hitler’s policies towards Europe’s Jews and applied them to South Africa’s blacks. He denounced the prime minister as a tyrant, an oppressor of the people and unrepresentative of all South Africans.

Tsafendas’s activist stance against South Africa was clearly informed by his experience campaigning for the independence of Mozambique.

He was arrested twice in 1964, once accused of preaching independence under the guise of religion. He had been touring villages with his Bible clearly displayed while preaching a political message.

Under questioning by the Portuguese security police, he told them fearlessly that he wanted to see “a Mozambique governed by the natives of that Province, be they white or black, and therefore separated from the mother nation.”

Tsafendas’s urgent desire to see Verwoerd removed from power crystallised one day in July 1966 when he sat on a public bench in Cape Town observing the Parliament building opposite and wondering if it would be possible to shoot Verwoerd there.

His first thought had been to kidnap the prime minister and exchange him for political prisoners, but he knew that was impossible on his own.

However, if he could get close to Verwoerd, hopefully with a gun…

MESSENGER AT PARLIAMENT

Tsafendas had bought a packet of fish and chips and was feeding the seagulls when a man sat next to him who was an off-duty messenger at Parliament.

Tsafendas realised that such a job would give him unparalleled access to Verwoerd. He wasted no time in applying for employment as a messenger at the House of Assembly.

Invited to an interview on July 18, Tsafendas bought a new suit, got a shave at a barber’s shop and taking three good references, appeared before the chief Parliamentary messenger and two senior messengers. On July 20, he was notified to report for duty on August 1.

During much of July 1966, Tsafendas had worked on commission for a men’s outfitters and spent a lot of time talking to potential customers on a Greek oil tanker, Eleni, anchored at Cape Town docks awaiting repairs.

The sales talk changed to amicable chats and when Tsafendas recounted his travels and adventures, the seamen became firm friends of this man they called “the professor.” Tsafendas talked incessantly of politics, invariably denouncing Verwoerd as “a tyrant,” or “a dictator.”

When someone pointed to Verwoerd’s photo in a newspaper, Tsafendas spat. Another time, he told the mostly Greek crew that in ancient Greece, it was a democratic citizen’s duty to kill a leader who was a tyrant or a dictator, like Verwoerd.

Soon after starting work in Parliament, Tsafendas laid his plans. He would shoot Verwoerd in the lobby, run from Parliament and take refuge in the Eleni. If he acted shortly before the tanker was due to leave, he could be out of the country within hours.

Needing a gun, he bought one for thirty dollars from a member of the crew, and decided to shoot Verwoerd at a cocktail party in Parliament, at which he was to be a waiter, on Friday, September 2, one day before the Eleni’s planned departure. It didn’t happen.

The night before the function, Tsafendas realised his weapon was only a gas pistol, and on September 3, the Eleni weighed anchor.

Watching the vessel depart, Tsafendas came to a monumental decision: he would use a knife to stab Verwoerd to death, knowing full well that he would never get away.

Early on Tuesday, September 6, Tsafendas bought two sheath knives from two different shops. One had a metal sheath and a spring clip, the other was more like a stiletto, with an aluminium hilt and a five-inch blade.

The two cost less than ten rand in total. At his locker in Parliament, he poured anti-rust solution onto the blades, hoping this might poison Verwoerd’s blood or make it harder to remove the knife from the flesh, thus causing greater damage. He put the knives into his locker and changed into his messenger’s uniform under which he wound a waist belt holding the two empty sheaths.

WAITED IN THE LOBBY

During the morning, Tsafendas ran messages and served curry lunches in the Press Gallery. An afternoon sitting was scheduled and a few minutes before the 2.10 pm division bell, Tsafendas retrieved the knives from his locker, inserted them into the empty sheaths and waited in the lobby.

When Verwoerd appeared, Tsafendas followed him into the debating chamber. His plan was to attack as Verwoerd walked to the front bench, but he had difficulty pulling the knife from its sheath and by the time he did so, Verwoerd had taken his seat.

Tsafendas walked up swiftly and stood over Verwoerd, who looked up inquiringly. Tsafendas paused fractionally, then raised his right hand and plunged the knife four times into Verwoerd’s chest and neck.

The Prime Minister slumped forward with blood spurting onto the green carpet. Suddenly, chaos reigned.

Sports Minister Frank Waring, a former Springbok rugby player, lunged forward, got a neck-lock on Tsafendas and pulled him off Verwoerd. Tsafendas resisted. Somebody shouted “Get the knife” and an MP prised it from Tsafendas’s fingers.

Other MPs formed a whirling scrum around the assailant, punching and kicking him. As Tsafendas was dragged out of the Chamber, his face and the front of his shirt covered in blood, he shouted, “Where is that bastard? I will get that bastard.” A policeman found the second knife on Tsafendas’s belt and removed it.

The dying Verwoerd was surrounded by at least five MPs who were doctors. He was deathly pale and bleeding profusely from four wounds.

One doctor tried mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and another injected two syringes of the stimulant Coramine into Verwoerd’s heart. Dr E.L.Fisher said, “We kept on treating him… but by then he had no pulse at all. It was hopeless.”

As Tsafendas was manhandled through the lobby, a frenzied spectator rushed at him, crying hysterically, but police fended him off. They bundled Tsafendas into a police car and sped off to the nearest police station.

At about 2.30 pm, an ambulance crew carried Verwoerd’s body on a stretcher through the lobby. His wife Betsie stroked her husband’s hair and kissed his forehead.

The crew then continued to Groote Schuur hospital. At 3.05 pm, Verwoerd’s death was confirmed by the medical superintendent of the hospital.

BELLOWED WITH ANGER

MPs collapsed in the lobby, others bellowed with anger. An official announcement later said Verwoerd was dead on arrival at the hospital. No mention was made of Dimitrio Tsafendas.

Look out for Part Two next week: Investigation, torture, trial, sentence, and many years later…