Dimitri Tsafendas
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Dimitri Tsafendas (14 January 1918 – 7 October 1999) assassinated South African Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd, one of the major architects of that country's apartheid program, on 6 September 1966. Tsafendas, who was a parliamentary messenger, stabbed Verwoerd with a dagger during a parliamentary session.
Tsafendas, at his trial, was found not guilty of murder by reason of insanity. He suffered from schizophrenia and claimed that he had a giant tapeworm inside him, which spoke to him. The court ordered that he be detained "at the pleasure of the State President", which meant that only the South African State President had the authority to release him. He was never released.
Under the apartheid regime's laws, having been charged with murder, Tsafendas was given a cell on death row in Pretoria Central Prison, next to the room in which men were hanged, sometimes seven at a time. Some have argued that this amounted to a form of abuse. Tsafendas was certified as insane and was ordered to be detained at Weskoppies, a psychiatric hospital. He remained there for nearly thirty years and died at the age of 81.
There is some evidence against the conventional view that Tsafendas was motivated purely by madness. Tsafendas, born in Maputo, Mozambique of a Greek father and a black mother whom he never knew, was shunned in South Africa because of his dark skin, though under the apartheid system's racial laws he was classified as white. Shortly before the assassination, Tsafendas, having fallen in love with a coloured woman, applied for reclassification as coloured.
Tsafendas' life is described in the book A Mouthful of Glass by Henk van Woerden (ISBN 1-86207-442-9). A play written by Anthony Sher and directed by Nancy Meckler, with Sher in the role of Tsafendas, ran at the Almeida Theatre in London in 2003.
