KILLER SET OUT AN HOUR EARLIER THAN USUAL TO BUY KNIVES FOR ATTACK IN PARLIAMENT
“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.” – Dimitri Tsafendas
AT A FEW minutes before 9am, central Cape Town was buzzing with rush hour traffic and hurried office workers.
On Hout Street, the weapons shops were not yet open, so Dimitris Tsafendas paced up and down the sidewalk. He was a heavy-set man of middle age, six feet tall and broad-shouldered, with large dark eyes, hard hands and jet-black hair cut short; he wore baggy, grey flannel trousers, a white shirt and a light-coloured jacket.
He had risen early, tense and stressed after only a few hours’ sleep. He had left his apartment in the Rondebosch area of the city a few minutes after 6am to then arrive at the House of Assembly at 6.45am.
This was an hour ahead of his normal start time, but it was important to get his messenger’s duties completed before leaving to buy the knives.
With time to spare before the weapons shops opened, he took a taxi to the waterfront to enjoy what he expected would be his last sight and smell of the sea.
Raising his face to the morning sky, he inhaled the sea air which had been so much part of his life: born in an Indian Ocean seaport, raised beside the Mediterranean, battling the angry Atlantic in the dangerous war years.
His dream had always been of another sea, the warm and sparkling Caribbean, and, perhaps naively, of a life of contentment on exotic, socialist Cuba.
However, on this fresh, clear morning of Tuesday, 6 September 1966, he knew that would remain forever a dream.
At 9.05am, Tsafendas entered City Guns, at 57 Hout Street, owned by Tony Harrison, and asked about the sheath knives in the window. Harrison placed two on the counter top. Glancing curiously at his first customer of the day, he thought he might be a fisherman or a merchant seaman.
Tsafendas slipped one knife onto his belt and inside his trousers and moved about experimentally. He was comfortable with knives. As a child, one of his favourite possessions was a bayonet from the first Balkan War, a gift from his grandmother, while his father had often handcrafted blades when he worked for the Iscor Iron and Steel Works in Pretoria.
The knife, priced at R3.30, less than US$5 at the time, was a regular, all-purpose product, with a metal scabbard and a spring clip to keep the blade in place.
Satisfied, Tsafendas nodded and paid with a R10 note from his wallet. As Harrison counted out the change, his customer pointed to an advertisement for a firearm and asked if a licence was necessary for such a weapon. When told yes, Tsafendas nodded and left.
A few metres down the street was Maurice
Klein’s hardware store, William Rawbone and Co. Tsafendas wanted a back-up knife in case something happened to the first, but he thought it best not to get both from the same source. He bought the second knife from the store; known as a Black Forest, it was more a stiletto with a patterned aluminium handle, a sheath and a silvered, double-edged blade nearly six inches long.
While Tsafendas was buying the knives, Prime Minister Dr Hendrik Frensch Verwoerd and his wife Betsie were flying into Cape Town airport after a weekend relaxing with family. A waiting limousine sped the couple directly to Groote Schuur, the prime minister’s official residence in Cape Town. There, Verwoerd began preparing for his scheduled appearance in Parliament that afternoon. It would be his first major speech of the current session and he had his hair cut for the occasion.
A morning’s work done, the premier and his wife ate a light lunch, then were driven together to the House of Assembly. Tsafendas turned towards the same destination. A 15-minute walk took him through the public 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 locker, changed into his navy blue messenger’s uniform and closed the locker door. For years, Tsafendas had wrestled with indignation and anger over the systematic degradation of South Africa’s black people. Desperately, he hoped that an enraged populace would one day lay siege to Parliament as the French revolutionaries had stormed the Bastille all those years ago. Of course, nothing of the sort had happened and now that almost all internal resistance to apartheid had been crushed, thanks to Dr Verwoerd’s brutal efficiency, it seemed clear that it was not going to happen any time soon. The major resistance groups, such as ANC, the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC), the African Resistance Movement (ARM) and the South African Communist Party (SACP) were banned and their top leaders imprisoned or in hiding or exile. Tsafendas could not get the thought out of his mind: it was Dr Verwoerd, who had turned his country into a police state, his spies and security men hunting down and silencing opponents by the vilest means. – Published by Jacana Media.