South Africa: Death to the Architect

It was a bright and balmy spring afternoon in Cape Town. In the public gardens beside the South African House of Assembly, brown squirrels scampered through the oak trees, and white men lazed comfortably on the benches marked “Europeans Only.” Inside the paneled assembly chamber, Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd strode down the aisle, took his green leather seat on the front bench and, in a gesture that had become automatic, touched the fingers of his left hand to a small scar on his jaw, all that remained of the assassin’s bullet that had nearly killed him in 1960. Verwoerd was in high spirits. He was about to make his first major speech of the session, and for the occasion he had had his hair cut.

In the hall at the rear of the chamber stood a large man in his late 40s. He had curly grey hair, swarthy skin and silver-capped front teeth. His name was Dimitrio Tsafendas, and he wore the uniform of a parliamentary messenger, a job for which he had been hired only a month before. Tsafendas was obviously distraught. At lunch with his fellow messengers, he had hardly touched his curry, left early without explanation. Now, as the warning bell summoned the Members of Parliament to their seats for the opening of the session, he refused to run a routine errand requested by a local newsman. “I have something to do,” he muttered. Then, with a six-inch dagger concealed in his right hand and two stilettos tucked in his belt, Tsafendas walked into the chamber.

Familiar Approach. In the press gallery above, Political Columnist Stanley Uys of the Johannesburg Sunday Times watched the messenger elbow his way through milling Assemblymen and approach Verwoerd. “I thought he was going to pat Dr. Verwoerd on the back,” said Uys. “I thought he was being excessively familiar. Then I saw the knife.”

Without uttering a word, Tsafendas drew the dagger out of its leather sheath, plunged it three times into Verwoerd’s chest and once into his neck. The House looked on in horror, too stunned to move. Verwoerd tried to raise one arm to protect himself, then, confused, used it to brush back his hair. He slumped over, blood spurting through his shirt.

Several Assemblymen grabbed Tsafendas and wrestled him to the floor. Others, including three doctors, rushed to try to revive Verwoerd. But it was to no avail. Dr. Hendrik Frensch Verwoerd, architect of apartheid and South Africa’s Prime Minister for eight years, was dead—just two days short of his 65th birthday.

Divine Instrument. His nation was stunned. In the cities, whites and blacks fought for copies of the newspaper extras that brought the first word of the assassination. In Johannesburg, a bus driver saw the headlines, stopped his bus, and fainted at the wheel. A quarter of a million South Africans, black as well as white, stood silently on the streets of Pretoria while his funeral procession filed past. Hundreds of thousands of whites flocked to their churches for solace. “May the God in whom we believe make clear to us in his own time what this horrible event is to signify to our country and her people,” intoned Cape Town’s Afrikaans-language Die Burger in an anguished editorial. “Now, we cannot fathom it.”

To most Afrikaners—and to many British South Africans as well—Verwoerd was much more than their Prime Minister. In a very real sense, he was the great white father of the nation and everything it believed in. In 1960, as he lay in a hospital bed recovering from the first effort to kill him, Verwoerd told his wife: “I heard the shots and then I realized that I could still think, and I knew that I had been spared to complete my life’s work.” Ever since, the Afrikaner volk has regarded his recovery as proof that God had chosen Verwoerd as his divine instrument to forge the South African nation.

Give & Take. And forge he did. He transformed South Africa’s traditional but largely informal white baasskap (bossdom) into the rigid apartheid laws that classified and separated the races, in the process stripping the nonwhites of rights basic to all in most countries. At the same time, however, Verwoerd believed that apartheid could last only if the whites gave as well as took. He spent millions of dollars on housing and education to improve the condition of his 12.5 million Africans, could truthfully say that they were the best-paid and best-fed blacks on the continent.

His policies, of course, were abhorrent to the rest of the world, but Verwoerd proved a skilled enough diplomat to hold the rest of the world at bay. He repeatedly chipped away at the antagonism of Africa’s young black nations by offering them favorable trade terms and technical assistance. Four days before his death he had set a precedent by receiving Prime Minister Leabua Jonathan of tiny Basutoland, the first black African chief of government ever to make an official visit to South Africa.

Nevertheless, there was little mourning in Black Africa last week. Prime Minister Jonathan barely managed, by a vote of 29 to 28, to get a motion of condolence through Basutoland’s Assembly. Laughter broke out in the Zambian legislature when the assassination was announced. Ethiopia’s Foreign Minister called Verwoerd’s death “the natural result of apartheid, which breeds blind hate and evil.”

The Heirs. The government reaffirmed its faith in apartheid even before Verwoerd’s blood had been cleaned off the floor of Parliament. If anything, the oppression of apartheid seems likely to be screwed on even tighter by the successor who will be chosen by the National Party this week. One possible heir is urbane Finance Minister Eben Donges, 68, who as the senior member of Verwoerd’s Cabinet became Acting Prime Minister upon his death. Another is Transport Minister Barend Jacobus (“Ben”) Schoeman, 61, a pug-nosed former labor leader who dropped out of school at 16. Most likely to continue Verwoerd’s grand schemes would be Defense Minister Pieter Willem Botha, 51, who, although inexperienced and relatively unknown, has become a leading theoretician of apartheid. Another candidate is Education Minister Jan de Klerk, 63, a party wheel horse with a powerful following in the Transvaal.

The man most likely to succeed, however, seemed to be Johannes Balthazar Vorster, 50, the burly Justice Minister who organized Verwoerd’s tough, efficient police force and who represents to hundreds of thousands of Afrikaners the thing they want most: security. To haters of apartheid, Vorster would be bad news. He is the hero of the party’s militant extreme right wing, which has long thought Verwoerd was doing too much for the blacks.

“I Will Bring Evil.” The supreme irony of it all is that Verwoerd’s assassin apparently thought so too. Dimitrio Tsafendas had been a drifter who hated the world. He speaks eight languages, has traveled all over the world as a merchant seaman—and has been confined in mental hospitals in both the U.S. and Portugal. He is also a religious fanatic who has dabbled in Buddhism, read the Bible, and often quotes his favorite passage from II Kings: “Thus saith the Lord, Behold, I will bring evil upon this place, and upon the inhabitants thereof.”

No one knows much about the killer. Born in Portuguese Mozambique, Tsatendas is said to be the illegitimate son of a mulatto woman and an Egyptian of Greek descent. Despite his mixed blood, he managed to pass himself off as a white, fooled the Verwoerd regime into granting him South African citizenship. Shortly after he was hired as a parliamentary messenger in August, he complained that his $140-a-month salary was not enough for a white man to live on. Verwoerd, he charged, was “doing too much for the coloreds and not enough for the poor whites.”

This was an attitude that any white leader of South Africa would have to come to terms with. To Verwoerd, the mixture of baasskap and benevolence came naturally. And evil as it was, it seemed to be a formula that could at least prevent an explosion of racial violence. The question was whether his successor could or would be able to govern in the same fashion.