The Man Who Killed Apartheid: The life of Dimitri Tsafendas

In the South African House of Assembly, on 6 September 1966,Dimitri Tsafendas stabbed to death Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd.Afterwards, Tsafendas was declared to be a schizophrenic whobelieved a tapeworm lived inside him which controlled his actions,and that he had no political motive for assassinating Verwoerd.Pronounced unfit to stand trial, Tsafendas went down in history as aderanged parliamentary messenger.For fifty years, this story prevailed. However, this book now revealsthe truth about Tsafendas; that he was deeply political from an earlyage. He was arrested numerous times, starting in Mozambique, thecountry of his birth.

In Portugal, the security police opened a file onhim in 1938, when he was aged only twenty. After the assassination,Tsafendas volunteered a series of incontestable political reasons forkilling Verwoerd, but these, along with details of his political past,were never allowed to see the light of day.This book reveals the extent of the cover-up by South Africa’sauthorities and the desperate lengths they went to conceal theexistence of Tsafendas’s opposition to apartheid. The book exposesone of the great lies in South African history, that Verwoerd wasmurdered by a mad man.

It also offers for the first time a completebiography of this extraordinary man.Advocate George Bizos characterised Dousemetzis’s work onTsafendas and Verwoerd’s assassination as ‘monumental’ and ofbeing ‘of major historical importance for South Africa and as to ourunderstanding of Verwoerd’s assassination’. Professor John Dugardsaid ‘South African history should know the truth about Tsafendas.Dousemetzis has done South Africa a service by correcting thehistorical record.’