John Matshikiza
WITH THE LID OFF
Will this go down as the cowardly century? It has been a century of powerful political movements, but the acts of political conviction that have caused the biggest ripples have been carried out by loners, individuals with no strangling ties to party politics. That’s one way of looking at it.
Another way is to say that the great political assassinations of the century have indeed been the results of conspiracies, but expediency has obliged the originators to distance themselves from the final act. If that is the case, there have been an awful lot of fall guys gaily prepared to pay the final penalty on behalf of their shadowy masters.
The assassination of archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo in June 1914 sparked off World Wars I and II, and indeed an ongoing series of conflagrations that continue to tear the Balkan region apart to this day. There was no particular organisation behind it, although the villainous Serbs were generally held responsible. A single assassin, a 19-year-old student and anarchist called Gavrilo Princip, took the rap.
The century’s most famous assassination was of course that of president John F Kennedy. In spite of the efforts of Oliver Stone and others to promote the idea of an elaborate conspiracy led by America’s military-industrial complex, Lee Harvey Oswald, a social drop-out with not much in the way of an IQ or political savvy, has stuck in the world’s consciousness as the lone gunman with an obscure and lonely agenda. In spite of the fact that the Kennedy assassination did much to change the balance of political forces across the globe, no political grouping has ever stepped forward to say, “This was our plan, and we’re pleased to announce that it worked out the way we wanted it.” We are asked to accept that random individuals are able to bring about massive transformations through random and spontaneous acts of violence.
Last week, South Africa’s greatest political assassin went to his grave, virtually unsung.
Like Princip and Oswald, Dimitri Tsafendas had seemed to be a man working to an individually inspired plan when he stabbed Hendrik Verwoerd, the “architect of grand apartheid”, to death in the legislative chamber of the Parliament buildings in Cape Town on September 6 1966. (It has been pointed out to me that those nicely aligned rows of sixes represent the sign of the devil, but I’m not prepared to digress into that kind of territory at this moment.) If Tsafendas was working alone (or almost alone) he had additional cover in the form of a talking tapeworm that allegedly inhabited his intestines, a beast that was relentlessly hyped by the official press all over the world thereafter, and was supposed to have been the sole inspiration behind the murder of the most powerful individual in Southern Africa at the time.
The semi-satirical British weekly Private Eye almost put the assassination in context when it portrayed a bunch of delighted Zulus prancing on its cover, over the headline: “Verwoerd: A Nation Mourns.” Mourn? This was akin to the assassination of Julius Caesar, and, as in those days of ancient Rome, there should have been shrewd politicians in the streets whipping up the plebeians (that’s you and me) into a frenzy of ecstasy and empowerment at the removal of a silver-tongued tyrant. Tsafendas’s dagger had not only felled a man, it had caused the despised and hated edifice of apartheid to falter into an uncertainty from which it never recovered. Black South Africa, at least, should have been dancing with joy at the news, and soberly planning how its cause of freedom could profit from the event.
Instead, we hesitated, not sure whether to laugh or cry. For a start, none of us would have actually dared to put into practice that thing we endlessly talked about: namely, cut off the head of the snake in order to set ourselves free. Now that someone had done it on our behalf, there was that sense of uncertainty that seizes the plantation when a vicious slave master is killed by that bad-ass Mandingo: “The baas is dead; who’s going to feed us now?”
Secondly, there were our pathetically indoctrinated minds. The assassin, we understood, was just a crazy Greek, another white man, just like the first white man, the farmer David Pratt, who had attempted to kill Verwoerd at the Rand Show. It wasn’t really political. Therefore it wasn’t our business.
The tapeworm and the whitewash were all bunk. Sure, Tsafendas had confided humorously to friends that he thought he must have a tapeworm inside him, because he couldn’t understand why he had such an insatiable appetite – for food, that is, not for killing politicians. In the years of interrogation after the killing, the tapeworm never showed up, although the cops tried to make Tsafendas utter it into the conversation so that they could justify their conclusion that he was insane.
So he wasn’t crazy, and he also wasn’t a Greek. His father was Greek, but his mother was a Mozambican mulatta. Dimitri Tsafendas was what was called an “octoroon” – roughly one-eighth black. He had grown up white, but was in fact, in Verwoerd’s nomenclature, black – or rather, coloured.
Tsafendas killed Verwoerd because Verwoerd’s relentless need to place people in race-labelled boxes was a personal disaster for himself. But, since his early infancy, he knew that it was also an affront to all humanity. In other words, his act of murder was based on the same principles as the Congress Alliance’s Freedom Charter: apartheid was a crime against life. Any warrior who would be prepared to strike a blow against it would be entitled to a place in heaven.
For 33 years we ignored Tsafendas. He had embarrassed us by getting straight to the point, while we were still justifying our pain.
Last Saturday, he was buried quietly in Krugersdorp. Ten people, mostly pious members of the Greek community, were in attendance. The politicians, and the humble victims of apartheid for whom he had struck the most awesome blow in the fight for freedom, chose to stay away.