Apartheid assassin
In a painstaking labour of justice, a Greek academic writes Tsafendas’s true story
Harris Dousemetzis didn’t know about prime minister Hendrik Verwoerd’s assassin Dimitri Tsafendas, but he was aware of apartheid from a young age. Born in Greece in 1977 to a mother who was a passionate supporter of the ANC, Dousemetzis was pulled out of bed to witness the release of Nelson Mandela in 1990.
“She told me who Mandela was, etcetera,” he says over the phone from the United Kingdom where he lectures in international relations.
Dousemetzis came across the assassin’s name in a Guardian obituary in 1999. Tsafendas, a parliamentary messenger when he killed Verwoerd in 1966, was declared insane and incarcerated for 33 years. He was born in the Portuguese colony of Mozambique to a Greek father and a racially mixed Mozambican mother.
Dousemetzis started learning more about him. This set into motion a process of revealing Tsafendas’s misunderstood role in the resistance against apartheid.
The author read A Mouthful of Glass: The Man Who Killed the Father of Apartheid by Henk van Woerden and came across an article in a British newspaper headlined “The man who killed apartheid”. The article was a sidebar to a spread about Greeks who had collaborated with and financed apartheid.
He then contacted some of the clerics featured in a Greek documentary about Tsafendas. He says what they said was nothing short of astonishing. “They were praising Tsafendas, in the highest possible terms,” he says. “Two of them considered Tsafendas to be a great hero, which was highly unusual for Christian Orthodox priests.”
He trawled through the archives in Portugal and South Africa.
“Everything said by witnesses to me, that Tsafendas was a political animal since he was a child, was confirmed by what was found in the archives,” he said. “I felt it was a major injustice against him ... It was an absolute disgrace to think Tsafendas was mad and that he killed Verwoerd because of a tapeworm.”
In this interview, he tells the Mail & Guardian of his mission and book. I thought for some time to write a book about Tsafendas, but then I thought just a book will not be enough to change people’s minds. I decided to take all the evidence that I gathered to the South African authorities and ask them to look at it. I figured I should present the evidence to some reputable South African jurists, so I contacted seven. Five of them agreed to look at my evidence and to collaborate with me in order to write an official report which would be submitted to the minister of justice.
They wrote to the minister of justice, asking him to look at the new evidence, make an official announcement accepting the new evidence and to take steps to correct the historical record.
I just felt it was a major injustice. I felt it was an absolute disgrace that Tsafendas is considered insane. It