Matthew Burbidge
A Mouthful of Glass by Henk van Woerden (Jonathan Ball)
The death of Dr HF Verwoerd was like that of John F Kennedy: everyone can remember exactly where they were when they heard the news.
The reports on the morning of September 6 1966 said Dimitri Tsafendas, a parliamentary messenger, had walked the length of the chamber and stabbed Verwoerd four times with a large knife. With those four stabs Tsafendas ended the life of the dokter who had set South Africa on a course of political division. Until this welcome account, however, the details of the life of the killer have been obscured.
He was said to be mad: the rumour was spread that he had claimed a large tapeworm had told him to do it – which must still be the most widely known “fact” about the man. At his trial he was judged unfit to plead and was banished to jail to be forgotten, first on Robben Island and then to Pretoria Central Prison. Tsafendas became increasingly deranged over the years, but the author suggests that he was aware of his actions when he carried out the stabbing.
Henk van Woerden, born in the Netherlands and raised in South Africa, spoke to the amiable but confused Tsafendas six months before he died last year in Sterkfontein hospital. Using the interviews, archives and a good measure of intuition, he has tracked Tsafendas’s wanderings all over the world, and describes the strange, mad South Africa that was the backdrop to the killing.
Tsafendas had been born in Louren?o Marques to a Swazi mother and a Greek father. He spent his childhood with his grandmother in in Egypt, later being sent back to Mozambique to his father. At boarding school in Middelburg he was the class clown and picked up the name “The Pig” because of his eating habits. He often behaved erratically and strangely. He was also restless and rootless: between 1942 and 1963 he landed up in Germany, the United States and Ankara, among other places, and was arrested five times, deported five times, twice imprisoned, and eight times refused entry into South Africa.
In 1965 he entered the country through Durban from Beira, and after some moving around, being stabbed during an argument and attracting the attention of the police for his communist views, he ended up in Cape Town, invited there by a Christian woman possibly intersted in marriage. His short stay in the city is well documented. The account is eerie: how could Van Woerden have known the exact details of Tsafendas’ job interview at Parliament? It certainly sounds authentic. He bought a dagger; some minutes later he bought another, larger knife, which he concealed under his uniform. Later that day he stabbed Verwoerd.
Van Woerden writes that his book is an attempt to bring back to memory that which has been forgotten, and the book is a notable accomplishment. If parts of the book are inventions based on Van Woerden’s “intuition”, they are convincing ones. And A Mouthful of Glass reads easily and elegantly in Dan Jacobson’s translation. It is a secret history of South Africa, and, yes, it will help us remember.
AMouthful of Glass is one of the titles on the Exclusive Books Publishers’ Choice promotion, a selection of 70 books for the festive season. Catalogues available at stores