THE ASSASSIN

A profile of the man who assassinated Hendrik Verwoerd, the architect of South Africa’s policy of apartheid, that is both a compelling study of a tragically disturbed individual and an affecting metaphor for the apartheid years.

Van Woerden, whose working-class family emigrated from Holland to South Africa in 1956 (when the author was only nine) has a special sympathy for the “coloreds” (South Africans of mixed race) who still live in a kind of racial no-man’s-land, discriminated against by both black and white. They were his family’s neighbors until the early 1960s, when Verwoerd, implementing his policy of racial separation, removed them from the racially mixed Cape Town suburbs and settled them on the bleak Cape Flats. Demitrios Tsafendas, the parliamentary messenger who assassinated Verwoerd in 1966, was also a colored. Born in 1918 in Mozambique, his father was Greek and his mother a half-caste. Using documents assembled by the authorities, as well as interviews with the aging Tsafendas (confined in a psychiatric hospital until his death in 1999), the author creates a perceptive portrait. He sees Tsafendas as a tragic, gifted figure, tormented by racism and mental illness alike, and driven to act by Verwoerd’s treatment of the coloreds and his own experiences (especially those with his family in South Africa, who shunned him). Van Woerden traces the long painful journey that ended with the assassination and began in childhood (when Tsafendas was sent to Egypt to be raised by his paternal grandmother)—and included sojourns in Greece, Turkey, Portugal, and even the US (where his status as an ex-Communist, rather than his racial history, led to his deportation).

A perfectly pitched biography that relies, as it should, as much on perceptive insights as documentation.