On this day in 1966, a Mozambique immigrant who was also a messenger in the South African Parliament, Demetrio Tsafendas stabbed the South African Prime Minister and apartheid architect, Hendrik Verwoerd, to death during a parliamentary meeting in Cape Town. The assailant, Demetrio Tsafendas, was a mixed racial descent, partly Greek and partly Swazi.
Verwoerd, a South African politician, scholar of applied psychology and sociology, was also a minister of native affairs and later as South African leader. He oversaw the introduction and application of South Africa’s racist apartheid policies. As prime minister from 1958, he instituted an intricate system of racist laws separating whites, Africans (Blacks), Coloureds and Asians, and resettled Black people in backwater reservations. These policies provoked anti-apartheid demonstrations by Black people, which were brutally crushed by government forces at Sharpeville and elsewhere.
In April 1960, Verwoerd who miraculously survived being shot twice in the head by an English farmer, proclaimed that his survival was evidence of God’s approval of his work. During the next few years, Verwoerd’s government arrested anti-apartheid leaders such as Nelson Mandela and sentenced them to long prison terms on the basis of various convictions. He had succeeded in temporarily crushing anti-apartheid resistance, but he could not prevent a mentally ill parliamentary page from walking up to him in the Houses of Assembly and stabbing him to death on September 6, 1966.
Tsafendas, who apparently was not acting in protest of apartheid, was sent to a mental hospital near Johannesburg, where he lived until his death in 1999. Apartheid was abolished in South Africa in 1993.
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