‘He saw Tsafendas raise his right hand …’
gardens that surrounded the parliament buildings, a neat, well-tended area he had come to know well from his frequent visits there.
White people strolled past the lawns and occupied public benches marked “Europeans Only” and “Slegs vir Blankes” (For Whites Only), and children squealed with excitement at the squirrels in the oak trees. There were no black or brown people, for had not Dr Verwoerd specifically declared a few years earlier that such people should not be allowed “to gaze” at the green pastures of European society? There was, he had said, “no place for them in the European community above the level of certain forms of labour”.
Alone in the messengers’ dressing room, Tsafendas unwrapped his morning purchases.
He slotted the empty sheaths onto his waist belt and slipped in the knives; everything fitted perfectly. He returned the blades to the locker, changed into his navy blue messenger’s uniform and closed the locker door.
After closing his locker door, Tsafendas mounted to the press gallery on the first floor of the House. He had five hours until 2.10pm, when the division bell would call MPs and ministers to the chamber, and he would do the deed.
He asked a fellow messenger to change lunch breaks with him so that he could take off between 1pm and 2pm instead of his rostered noon to 1pm. That way, there would be less danger of being ordered on an errand away from the chamber. The messenger refused. At 1.05pm, Tsafendas walked into the messengers’ room carrying his meal, a plate of curry and rice, which he shared with a colleague. Back in the press gallery after his lunch break, Tsafendas was sent for a plate of curry by a South African Broadcasting Corporation staffer, but the reporter complained about the quality and refused to eat it.
Needing to return the curry to the cafeteria, Tsafendas said he was “in a hurry” and asked a colleague to do so. The other messenger refused, saying he was still on his lunch break, so Tsafendas took the plate himself and hurried off. “I have something to do,” he said. This was around 1.50pm.
With the division nearing, Tsafendas hurried down to the messengers’ room. Alone again, he opened a container of antirust solution, which he had brought from his tool box at home. He doused both blades in the liquid, which he hoped would infect Dr Verwoerd’s blood if he survived the stabbing.
The label said the solution contained hydrochloric acid, nitrites, oxalic acid and phosphoric acid, so surely, he thought, it would do a human harm. He then fitted the sheaths to the waist belt under his uniform and inserted the knives. He checked his watch. There was time. He flipped open his wallet and took out a photograph of his adored late father, Cretan-born Michalis, engineer-cum-revolutionary. Tsafendas wondered if his father would agree with what he was about to do; whatever his reaction, he knew that he would not condemn it. Indeed, only years and circumstances prevented his father from playing the executioner himself. When the white farmer David Pratt shot and wounded Verwoerd back in 1960, Michalis said it was a shame the prime minister survived and joked that if he had not had a family, he would himself have taken a gun and shot everyone in the South African parliament. After separating from Marika, his wife and Dimitris’s stepmother, Michalis often said that he should never have married, but should have been a rebel, fighting against apartheid and for the independence of Mozambique and other African countries.
Tsafendas smiled wryly at the thought of his stepmother’s likely reaction to what he was about to do. She would automatically blame his father — for Dimitri’s upbringing and for planting dangerous political ideas in his mind.
Michalis would describe himself as an anarchist. His son, more doctrinaire, was an admitted communist. Despite the strictures of family and friends, there was an unbreakable bond — a blood tie, but an ideological one too — between father and son.
Along with his father’s photo was another one — of him and Eleni Banovic, the 12-year-old daughter of Father Nikola Banovic, a Greek Orthodox priest he had met in Istanbul in 1961. Tsafendas was a guest in his house for four months and became close to the family, especially their only child, whom he fondly called “Elenitsa”, and loved her as if she were his own. However, nine months after he left Istanbul, his beloved Elenitsa drowned while swimming. He only learnt this much later, in a letter from her father in response to a gift he had sent her.
Reading that letter, he often said, was one of the saddest moments of his life.
Tsafendas slotted the pictures back into his wallet and walked into the parliamentary lobby. One hundred and sixty MPs were taking their places on the green benches of the debating chamber ahead of the 2.10pm division bell; officials were rushing to their desks, and the public galleries and the diplomatic bays were filling up quickly. There was a sense of expectation in the House because Dr Verwoerd was expected to make an important announcement. After meetings with Leabua Jonathan, prime minister of Lesotho, a new foreign policy initiative had been drafted regarding the “pocket states” of Lesotho and Botswana, which Dr Verwoerd was expected to reveal.
The prime minister made his appearance shortly after 2pm. He was an impressive figure by any standards: tall and broadshouldered, immaculately suited with his newly coiffed silver hair brushed carefully left to right, he dominated those around him. Blue-eyed and with an upturned nose, he did not have the face of a Roman senator, but authority was evident in the severe set of the mouth and the questing eyes. His public speeches were unhurried, intense and to the point, more the cerebral professor than the rabble-rousing orator. His two bodyguards escorted him to his front-bench place, then left for their usual seats in the public gallery, about 100 feet [30m] away.
Tsafendas knew that this was the only time the prime minister was without a guard.
As he reached his seat, Verwoerd looked towards the spectators’ gallery for his wife, but she was not in her usual place, delayed by a crowded elevator.
He turned to acknowledge greetings from National Party MPs around him.
The prime minister was in high spirits, even jaunty, and with reason: the national economy was booming, thanks to cheap black labour, with the highest growth rate in the world after Japan. A few months earlier, his party had comfortably won a new term in office. Commanding the space around him, smiling, nodding, confident, he looked unassailable, a picture of total power.
Indeed, he thought, God was on his side. Six years earlier he had survived the bullets of David Pratt, a sure sign, Dr Verwoerd said, that God approved of his race policies and had spared him to ensure their implementation. Was it this miraculous survival that made him unafraid of assassins? Was it faith in divine protection that emboldened him to remark in 1962, “If someone really wants to kill you, it’s not a very hard job. One thing is certain, there’s no point going around worrying about it.”
He was about to discover that when it came to his race policies and implementing apartheid, his God had changed his mind.
The division bell rang and MP Aubrey Radford walked into the chamber some distance behind Verwoerd. As he did so, he was pushed violently from behind.
Spectators saw a burly man in a messenger’s uniform plunge past Radford towards the front bench, wrestling with his waist belt. Moving swiftly for a man of his size, Tsafendas strode the last few paces across the floor of the House to the front bench. The Black Forest was now free and he stood over the seated prime minister.
Verwoerd was idly fingering a small scar on his jaw, a souvenir of Pratt’s bullets, when he became aware of the figure before him. Apparently thinking he was about to receive a message, he looked up inquiringly in time to see his assailant raise his right hand holding a knife.
Verwoerd thrust up an arm to ward off the blow, but Tsafendas plunged the blade into the seated man’s chest, just left of centre. He pulled the knife out and struck again, into Verwoerd’s lung. He stabbed twice more, the heart and the neck. Verwoerd slumped forward with blood spurting from his neck and quickly forming a pool on the green carpet.