OWN CORRESPONDENT and AFP, Johannesburg | Friday 11.15am
DIMITRI Tsafendas, the parliamentary messenger who assassinated prime minister Hendrik Verwoerd, died in a mental hospital outside Johannesburg on Thursday.
Tsafendas, who had been in poor health following a stroke, died of pneumonia, aged 81. His death comes just as his case has returned to public eye, thanks to a documentary on his life.
The assassination of Verwoerd, architect of apartheid, marked a turning point in South African history: Afrikaner nationalism broke into feuding factions, and there was a slow retreat from the ideological certainty embodied by Verwoerd.
On September 6 1966, Tsafendas, dressed in his messenger uniform, walked between the benches of parliament, shouldered aside an MP and plunged a knife four times into Verwoerd.
During his trial, and for years afterwards, Tsafendas was portrayed as an apolitical “madman” who told police that he received orders from a giant tapeworm inside him.
Tsafendas was described as a “meaningless creature” by Justice Beyers, judge president of the Cape, who said “I can as little try a man who has not at least the makings of a rational mind as I could try a dog”. He pronounced Tsafendas insane, and ordered that he spend the rest of his life as a state president’s patient.
A loophole in the law allowed the government to keep Tsafendas on Death Row in Pretoria Central Prison for more than 25 years. Fellow prisoner Breyten Breytenbach reported that Tsafendas was kept in the last cell next to the gallows, where every week prisoners were hung in batches, the sounds “leaving him howling like a dog”.
Warders were also reported to have made a practice of urinating in his food and beating him up while trussed in a straight-jacket.
In 1989, at the beginning of the FW de Klerk presidency, Tsafendas was moved to a lower security prison, and in 1994, one of the first acts of the new ANC government was to move him to the Sterkfontein mental hospital outside Johannesburg.
Born in Mozambique in 1918, Tsafendas had a white Cypriot father and a black Mozambican mother. Because of his dark complexion, he was teased by white children and called “blackie”. He was classified white in South Africa, but shortly before the assassination, had taken the unusual step of applying to be reclassified as coloured.
The Tsafendas case was recently revived thanks to the passionate research of documentary film maker Lisa Key, who not only produced a film of his life, but even testified on his behalf to the Truth Commission.
It was Key’s research for example, which revealed that the “tape worm” tale was untrue; that Tsafendas was once a communist party member; and that experts had been astonished by the precision of the stabbings, which suggested the work of a “trained assassin”.