Dimitri Tsafendas (; 14 January 1918 – 7 October 1999) was a Greek–Mozambican political militant and the assassin of Prime Minister of South Africa Hendrik Verwoerd.Beresford, David (11 October 1999), Obituary: Long-jailed assassin of South African premier in The Guardian. Archived by WebCite at Retrieved 8 July 2009. On 6 September 1966, while working as a parliamentary messenger, Tsafendas stabbed Verwoerd – commonly regarded as the architect of apartheid – to death during a sitting of the House of Assembly in Cape Town.
Early life Tsafendas was born in Lourenço Marques in Portuguese Mozambique. His parents were Michalis Tsafandakis (, also spelled Miguel Tsafandakis), a Greek marine engineer with anarchist leanings from Kitharida, a small village near Heraklion, Crete, and Amelia Williams, a Mozambican woman of mixed race. He was sent to Egypt when he was three to live with his grandmother and his aunt.Hollington, Kris. 2008. Wolves, Jackals, and Foxes: The Assassins Who Changed History. New York: Macmillan, p. 116. He returned to Mozambique four years later; then, at the age of ten, moved to Transvaal, where he attended Middelburg Primary School from 1928 to 1930. He then returned to Mozambique and attended a church school for the next two years.
Tsafendas was familiar with politics from an early age. Several members of his family were Cretan rebels during the Great Cretan Revolution (1866-1869), while his father was a passionate anarchist. At the age of 16, Tsafendas began to work at various jobs, and was dismissed from one of them "owing to his Communist leanings" and after he was suspected of being "engaged in disseminating Communistic propaganda." When he was 20, the Portuguese security police, PIDE, opened a file on Tsafendas after discovering that he had twice distributed Communist propaganda. In 1939, Tsafendas entered South Africa illegally and joined the South African Communist Party. He became a seaman in the US merchant marine in 1941 and served aboard American ships during World War II. While in the United States, Tsafendas became a member of a religious sect known as the Two by Twos.
In 1947, the US immigration authorities deported Tsafendas to Greece, then in the throes of the Greek Civil War. Tsafendas joined the Democratic Army, the military wing of the Greek Communist Party, and fought with them against the royalists. Shortly before the war ended in defeat for the Communists, Tsafendas made his way to Portugal. Upon his arrival, he was arrested and interrogated by the police about his political activities in Mozambique in 1938. He was imprisoned for nine months in the two most notorious Portuguese prisons for political offenders, the Barca d'Alva and the Aljube Prison. In October 1951, Tsafendas travelled by sea to Lourenço Marques, but was refused entry because of his past political activities and for being a known Communist, and was deported back to Portugal. Banned from entering South Africa, where his family had gone to live in the late 1930s, and Mozambique, Tsafendas spent the next 12 years of his life in exile. During these years, he applied at least once a year for permission to enter Mozambique or South Africa, but all his applications were refused because of his Communist status and his political activities in Mozambique in the 1930s. Constantly harassed in Portugal by PIDE and the Portuguese police, Tsafendas roamed across Europe and the Middle East, working and visiting places that interested him. During his wanderings, he picked up eight languages. While in Turkey in 1961, he worked for some six months as a teacher of English at the Limasollu Naci College, a prestigious private language institute in Istanbul, and upon eventually securing his return to South Africa, he worked for a time as a translator at Durban Court. In 1962, during a visit to Crete to see his father's and ancestors' birthplace, he met some former World War II Greek partisans who had participated in the kidnapping of German general Heinrich Kreipe. They trained him in bomb-making.
In 1963, Tsafendas was granted amnesty by Portugal after he convinced them that he was a reformed man and no longer a Communist, and he was eventually allowed to return to Mozambique. A year later, Tsafendas was arrested while addressing local people in favour of independence for the colonial territory. In a suitcase containing anti-colonialist and Communist literature, Tsafendas also had several Bibles. He told the police he was not advocating independence but preaching Christianity. The Portuguese were not convinced, and he was charged with "pretending to be a missionary spreading the word about religion" while actually preaching "under the guise of religion in favour of Mozambique's independence". According to PIDE's interrogation transcript, "When asked to describe all of the subversive activities that he has been developing against the Country and in favour of Mozambique's independence, he answered: That, he hasn't been developing any kind of such subversive activities against the Country, neither in favour of Mozambique's independence. However, wishes to clarify that he supports, as a Mozambican, the idea of Mozambique's independence, governed by the natives of that Province, whether they are black or white."
The Portuguese were not convinced that Tsafendas was telling the truth, and he was imprisoned. After three months in custody, Tsafendas claimed that he was in fact an apostle, Saint Peter. He was taken to a hospital, where he convinced the Portuguese doctors that he really believed he was Christ's foremost apostle and was therefore considered to be insane. He was released from prison custody and soon afterwards released from the hospital.
In 1965, Tsafendas returned to South Africa. Shortly before the assassination, he applied for reclassification from "White" to "Coloured" but his application was turned down.
Verwoerd's assassination In July 1966, at the age of 48, Tsafendas obtained a temporary position as a parliamentary messenger in the House of Assembly in Cape Town. When he first decided to take action against Verwoerd, Tsafendas planned to kidnap the prime minister. However, he soon realised that it would be impossible to do this on his own since his former comrades from the SACP were not keen on participating in anything risky or violent. With the access his new job permitted him, he decided instead to assassinate Verwoerd. He believed that since he had the opportunity to act he was morally obliged to do so, believing as he did that Verwoerd was "the brains behind apartheid" and that without him a change of policy would sooner or later take place. Years later, he told two priests who visited him in the hospital: "Every day, you see a man you know committing a very serious crime for which millions of people suffer. You cannot take him to court or report him to the police because he is the law in the country. Would you remain silent and let him continue with his crime or would you do something to stop him? You are guilty not only when you commit a crime, but also when you do nothing to prevent it when you have the chance."
Tsafendas's initial plan was to shoot Verwoerd, escape in the confusion, hide in the Eleni, a Greek tanker that was docked in Cape Town, and then sail away with it to freedom. Ultimately, his plan was to seek refuge in Communist Cuba. However, he had difficulty getting hold of a gun and with time running out and his temporary employment about to expire, he decided to use a knife to kill Verwoerd.
On 6 September, Prime Minister Verwoerd entered the debating chamber of Parliament and made his way to his seat. Tsafendas approached him, drew a concealed sheath knife from his belt, and stabbed Verwoerd about four times in the torso before he was pulled away by other members of parliament.Morris, Michael and Linnegar, John with the South Africa Ministry of Education, Human Sciences Research Council, Social Cohesion & Integration Research Programme. 2004. Every Step of the Way: the journey to freedom in South Africa. Cape Town: HSRC Press, pp. 184–185. He had made no plan for escape and was easily apprehended. He was taken into police custody, where he was severely beaten, and then moved to a hospital where he was treated for his injuries and interviewed by a psychiatrist. Later, he was returned to jail pending trial.
Reaction and police investigation After the assassination, some leaders in the anti-apartheid movement distanced themselves from any association with Tsafendas. However, others like Johnny Makatini, leader of the ANC in Algiers, hailed the assassination as "the beginning of the end for apartheid" and said it would "help the morale of guerrilla fighters in South Africa (and) increase confusion among whites". Also in Algiers, Joshua Nkomo, the representative of the Zimbabwe African People's Union (ZAPU), said that "the attack ... proved the vulnerability of this fascist empire" and Uazuvara Ewald Katjivena, representative of the South West African People's Organization (SWAPO), declared that "the fascist Dr. Verwoerd got what he deserved". Kenya's Minister of Defence, Njoroge Mungai, said when he first heard about the stabbing, "I hope it is successful. It would be a good thing", and the ruling Kenya African National Union declared that force would be the ultimate method of overthrowing apartheid and characterised the assassination as "a symbolic and heartening act, from which millions suffering from apartheid would draw hope". People in Nigeria and Uganda danced in the streets with joy when they heard the news of the assassination.
The majority of the African press applauded the assassination. For example, the Algerian-French magazine Revolution Africaine applauded the assassination of "the apostle of hatred", and said, "The most hated man of Africa is no more", in Ethiopia, a banner headline in the New Times of Addis Ababa said, "The Sharpeville butcher stabbed to death", while Cairo's Al Akhbar newspaper said Egypt had "no tears to shed" for Verwoerd.
In contrast, fearing reprisals, Tsafendas' family and the Greek community in South Africa turned their backs on him.
Throughout his time in custody Tsafendas was subjected to severe torture from beatings, electric shocks, mock hangings and pretended defenestrations. During his interrogation, Tsafendas gave incontestable political reasons for killing Verwoerd: "I did believe that with the disappearance of the South African prime minister a change of policy would take place. I did set myself the task of destroying the prime minister. It was my own idea to kill him. No one offered me any reward for doing so. I did not care about the consequences, for what would happen to me afterwards. I was so disgusted with the racial policy that I went through with my plans to kill the prime minister. ... I wanted to see a government representing all the South African people. I do not think the Nationalist government is representative of the people and I wanted to see a different government".
At the same time, the Portuguese security police, embarrassed that Tsafendas, a Portuguese citizen with a long history of political activism in Mozambique who had also fooled them into granting him amnesty by pretending he was no longer a communist and or an anti-colonialist, had assassinated Verwoerd, moved quickly to hide their discomfort. Two days after the assassination, the Chief Inspector of PIDE in Lisbon instructed his counterparts in Mozambique not to give the South African authorities "any information indicating Tsafendas as a partisan for the independence of your province [country]". The PIDE in Mozambique thus lied and misled the South African police as to Tsafendas's past political activities.