The Man Who Killed Apartheid: The Life of Dimitri Tsafendas

"I’m very interested in Africa . I did a lot on it in my book Small Wars, Far Away Places , about the Congo. But I’d never really done work on South Africa, so I thought I would really go to town on this one. I did a lot of work on the origins of apartheid and Verwoerd’s role in it. He was an academic sociologist, concerned with the fate of the white working class and gradually devised apartheid. Verwoerd was Dutch by birth. The Dutch political system is based on something called ‘pillarisation’. That’s the most literal translation of the Dutch, but a better one would be ‘silos’. You grew up in a silo, as a social democrat, or as a Catholic, or Protestant, or as a conservative. And you never really go out of that milieu. It’s weaker today, but historically, that was the case. At the same time, Calvinist theology says that the worst nightmare is the Tower of Babel, where everything just dissolves into one great diverse whole. So apartheid is really designed to restore the lines, the boundaries, the red lines, which Verwoerd certainly did. He was also an anti-Semite who turned away ships full of Jewish refugees, and he had strong sympathies with Nazi Germany. In fact, the man he appointed head of the South African Broadcasting Association, christened his son Izan, which is Nazi spelt backwards. That’s perhaps all we really need to know about these people! There were two attempts to kill Verwoerd. The first attempt, virtually unknown, was by an English farmer called David Pratt, whose daughter has recently written quite an affecting memoir about her dad. David Pratt was driven in a chauffeur-driven Rolls by one of his servants to the Rand Show, where Verwoerd was handing out the prizes. He walked up to him and shot him in the face with a pistol. Unfortunately, it wasn’t a very high-powered pistol. Verwoerd survived and was out of hospital in about six weeks. He said it was a bit like having bad sinus trouble. But Pratt had a long history of depressive illness, and he’d done things like follow his Dutch ex-wife back to the Netherlands, where the police and customs people stopped him. He had a loaded revolver in his luggage and was going to shoot her. He wasn’t a happy man on all sorts of levels. Some of his businesses had failed. He’d tried to go into trout farming to provide trout to Johannesburg restaurants and that was a disaster. Everything he touched was bad. They ended up putting him in an asylum. They said he wasn’t fit enough to stand trial. He allegedly hanged himself with the sheets a year later. The second assassin did kill Verwoerd in 1966 at the state opening of Parliament—while working as a parliamentary messenger. He was a Greek-Mozambican former merchant seaman called Dimitri Tsafendas and came from a long line of Cretan communists. His father was a very active person and had fought the royalists and the Nazis. He was a rather overweight youth, and clearly had some mental problems. He also suffered from a tapeworm in his childhood (that’s quite significant). He tried all sorts of jobs and for political and other reasons couldn’t build a stable career. So he became a merchant seaman, going off on ships. “When looking at assassinations, it’s the unforeseen consequences of them that interests me more that the fulfilment of immediate, planned objectives” This is where it gets interesting. Whenever he was trying to stay in countries he wasn’t allowed to enter, he conveniently had a mental breakdown the moment he got on shore and would be put into an asylum. Now, in one asylum, I think in America, an Irish inmate told him that it was no good saying to the shrink that he didn’t feel well or that he was hearing God’s voice from the radiator, but that he had to think of something really clever to get their interest. So Tsafendas said, ‘Well, what about if I had a tapeworm in my stomach giving me orders?’ The Irish inmate said, ‘Yes, that’s it!’ From then on, he’d roll this story out every time, in every asylum. When he was put into one in Paddington, which was a real dump, he heard there was a much more deluxe asylum on the Isle of Wight. So he rolled out the tapeworm story, and then they transferred him to the Isle of Wight luxury conditions. It was all quite crafty. After the assassination, the South African police quickly got all of his medical records from all over the world, as he’d been in nine or ten asylums in different countries doing the same thing. They saw that after a while they would give him pills and let him go and off he would go, back to sea. Another problem for the South African authorities was that he was mixed race. He was ‘white enough’ for them not to want to put him on trial for killing the architect of apartheid. He was of mixed race. They decided they couldn’t do that, so they tortured him for weeks and then got him to come out with this nonsense that the “dragon worm” told him to kill Verwoerd. At that point, they said he was unfit to stand trial and declared him mentally incompetent and insane. Interestingly, at first they imprisoned him on Robben Island in solitary confinement, near Mandela . And you don’t do that if a person is insane. Then they moved him to Pretoria Central Prison, where they put him next to the death cell where they executed people. Every year he heard over 100 people being hanged through the walls. He was badly treated all through his stay there. Finally, maybe five or 10 years before his death, he was moved to a rural psychiatric asylum, which was the first time he’d ever been near an asylum after the assassination. Yes, it was. The ANC didn’t take any interest in him whatsoever. He had killed Verwoerd, but it didn’t make much difference, because John Vorster, who was Verwoerd’s replacement, was an even more evil character. I was interested in all this and in Verwoerd himself. I didn’t realise that he wasn’t a native Afrikaner. He was born in the Netherlands. And his parents took him to South Africa as a boy. He was, in a way, plus royaliste que le roi —he became a more fanatical Afrikaner nationalist than the locals. I found that fascinating, as well as the whole question of whether Tsafendas was mad or not. Both he and Pratt gave very good reasons for killing Verwoerd. Yes, of course. And they didn’t want his assassin to be white, either, because that rather got in the way of the impression they were trying to create. While I was reading all these books on apartheid, I was writing an LSE Ideas pamphlet about Brexit, England and Ireland. One of the other two contributors was at Queen’s University, Belfast and was one of the main people I’d read on the evolution of apartheid, Adrian Guelke. He specialises in South Africa. In the 1990s, a South African agent, based in London at the embassy, got wind of the fact that there was somebody with Sinn Fein sympathies co-ordinating the party’s connections with the ANC. And they wanted this person dead. But what this agent did was to substitute Professor Guelke’s name on some documents, because the agent wanted him dead as well, because of his books on apartheid. That was then slipped to some loyalist terror organizations, who one night came into his house and shot him in his bed. He wasn’t killed because the gun jammed after a few rounds. But it was done quite deliberately, to confuse the two men’s names to get him killed. He had no connection with Sinn Fein whatsoever. I just thought that was extraordinary, the way the South African secret police went around the world knocking people off—which undoubtedly they did. Yes, of course it is. It’s the sharp end of what people nowadays would call transnational repression. Mossad’s got a disgraceful record, as you can see when you read my book. Ronen Bergman, who’s written a big book about the assassinations of Mossad, has worked out that they’ve killed 2,700 people in the last 70 years or so. They present it as the result of weighty moral deliberation, that they almost reluctantly decide to kill somebody. In fact, they make mistakes and people get put on to the list of targets for quite arbitrary reasons. In the case of Khaled Mashal, the Hamas leader, they tried to poison him in Amman, Jordan—only because the top target had American permanent residency, so they weren’t going to kill him. The operation was botched and Mashal survived. He lives in Doha now. As far as I know, he hadn’t been involved in any terrorist activities at all, they just wanted him gone. Then they’ve made absolute mistakes. When they were on the hunt for the Black September people who carried out the hijacking of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics in 1972, they thought they’d got the leader of that, a man in Lillehammer in Norway, and went after him and killed him, shooting him in the street in front of his pregnant girlfriend. In fact, it turned out, he was a completely innocent Moroccan waiter who also had a daytime job as a swimming pool attendant. The idea, which is often put about in films and TV programmes, that they’re these super professional, super cool killers is just nonsense. They’re not."