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?
― Tsafendas on why he killed Hendrik Verwoerd
Dimitri Tsafendas (14 January 1918 – 7 October 1999) was a Mozambican militant who assassinated Hendrik Verwoerd, "the architect of apartheid".
Biography[]
Dimitri Tsafendas was born in 1918 in Portuguese Mozambique. When he was three years old, he was sent to Egypt and lived there for several years before going back to Mozambique and then to South Africa, where he attended Middelburg Primary School. He also attended a church school in Mozambique.
He got an unspecified job, but was fired for having Communist leanings. The Portuguese security police (PIDE) opened up a file on Tsafendas after finding out that he distributed Communist propaganda. He illegally entered South Africa and joined the South African Communist Party. Later, he served in the US merchant navy during the Second World War.
Tsafendas was deported to Greece when the war ended and fought in the Greek Civil War on the Communist side. When he realised that the war was lost, he went to Portugal and was arrested for his political activities in Mozambique. Eventually, he was released after pretending not to be a Communist any more, only to later be arrested in Mozambique and charged with pretending to be a missionary, as he had been caught with Communist literature and a Bible. He only escaped by pretending to be insane so they would let him go.
In July 1966, at the age of 48, Tsafendas obtained a temporary position as a parliamentary messenger in the House of Assembly in Cape Town. While he was there, he saw the evils of the apartheid regime and decided to stop it by killing the prime minister, Hendrik Verwoerd. On 6 September, he stabbed the prime minster to death. Unfortunately, this did not stop apartheid. He was arrested and tortured, but deemed insane and died of pneumonia at the age of 81.