Dimitri Tsafendas

On 23 April 2018, a document entitled "Report to the Minister of Justice, advocate Tshilio Michael Masutha, in the Matter of Dr Verwoerd's Assassination" was submitted to the Minister of Justice of South Africa Michael Masutha by Judge Jody Kollapen. The report was written by Harris Dousemetzis, a tutor at Durham University, England, and consisted of three hardback volumes totalling 2,192 pages and 861,803 words. It was accompanied by a 16GB USB that contained all the evidence gathered by the author for this research, including about 12,000 pages of documents located in the National Archives of South Africa, Portugal and the United Kingdom, 137 interviews, including 69 with people who knew Tsafendas personally, some of them well and even as a child, as well as thousands of newspaper articles.

On 24 April 2018, Solly Mapaila, First Deputy General Secretary of the South African Communist Party, made a similar request to the Minister of Justice on behalf of his Party: "We hereby request that the Minister assesses and considers the new evidence, based on research by Mr Harris Dousemetzis, on the assassination of Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd and that the act be classified as politically motivated".

In November 2018, The Man Who Killed Apartheid: The Life of Dimitri Tsafendas by Harris Dousemetzis and Gerry Loughran was published in South Africa. Justice and Correctional Services Minister Michael Masutha described the book's launch as "a moment to celebrate the truth" about Tsafendas.

Tsafendas's life story and his assassination of Hendrik Verwoerd are briefly mentioned in the book The Girl Who Saved the King of Sweden by Jonas Jonasson, published in 2012.

Tsafendas, at the age of 81, died of pneumonia in October 1999, 33 years after the assassination. At the time of his death, he was not regarded as a hero in anti-apartheid circles, which sent no members to attend his funeral. The funeral was held according to Greek Orthodox rites, and he was buried in an unmarked grave outside Sterkfontein Hospital. Fewer than ten people attended the service.

In 1994, he was transferred again, this time to Sterkfontein psychiatric hospital outside Krugersdorp. In 1999, South African filmmaker Liza Key was allowed to conduct two televised interviews with him, for a documentary called A Question of Madness in which she raised the suggestion that Tsafendas's act was not mindless but politically motivated.

Tsafendas was initially held on Robben Island, then after four months was transferred to Pretoria Central Prison. There he occupied a cell on death row that was specially built for him next to the execution chamber where men were hanged. Tsafendas was subjected to some form of inhuman and cruel torture for most of his imprisonment. In 1989, he was transferred to Zonderwater Prison near Cullinan. In 1994, and after apartheid had collapsed, Tsafendas was visited in prison by two Greek Orthodox priests he knew and told them that he killed Verwoerd because he was "a dictator and a tyrant who oppressed his people." Tsafendas attempted to justify the assassination and told them:

In 1976, Bill Turner wrote and staged in England and South Africa a play simply titled Tsafendas. In 1998, Dutch author Henk van Woerden, who visited Tsafendas in hospital towards the end of Tsafendas's life, published the award-winning memoir, A Mouthful of Glass. An award-winning play entitled Living in Strange Lands by Anton Krueger was presented to South African audiences in 2002. A London production entitled I.D. was written by the noted Shakespearean actor Antony Sher, who lived in Cape Town at the time of the incident. I.D. premiered at the Almeida Theatre in London in 2003, followed by an American debut in 2005.

In July 1966, at the age of forty-eight, 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."

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.

In 1963, Tsafendas was granted amnesty by the Portuguese 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."

In 1947, the U.S. Immigration authorities deported Tsafendas to Greece, which was in the throes of a civil war. Joining the Democratic Army, the military wing of the Greek Communist Party, Tsafendas 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 to the country, 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 Aljuba 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 was forced to spend the next 12 years of his life in exile. Over these years he would apply 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. Sometimes, when he was down and out, he would claim to be mentally ill so as to secure food and shelter. 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 Greek partisans from the Second World War who had participated in the kidnapping of the Nazi General Heinrich Kreipe, and they trained him in bomb-making.

Tsafendas was born in Lourenço Marques (today's Maputo) to Michalis Tsafandakis (Greek: Μιχάλης Τσαφαντάκης, 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. 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.

Dimitri Tsafendas (Greek: Δημήτρης Τσαφέντας; 14 January 1918 – 7 October 1999) was a Greek-Mozambican lifelong political militant and the assassin of Prime Minister of South Africa Hendrik Verwoerd on 6 September 1966. Tsafendas, while working as a parliamentary messenger, stabbed Verwoerd to death during a sitting of the House of Assembly in Cape Town; Verwoerd is commonly regarded as the architect of Apartheid.

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 U.S. merchant marine in 1941 and served aboard American ships during the Second World War. While in the United States, Tsafendas became a member of a religious sect known as the Two by Twos.