Dimitri Tsafendas was an anarchist/communist activist born in 1918 in the city of Lourenço Marques, Mozambique, of Greek and Mozambican descent. Tsafendas entered history for assassinating South African Prime Minister H.F. Verwoerd on September 6, 1966. Dimitri Tsafendas stabbed H.F. Verwoerd to death during a regular session of the legislative chamber in Cape Town.
Tsafendas was the son of the Greek anarchist Michalis Tsafandakis and Amélia Williams, a Black Mozambican woman. From an early age, Dimitri Tsafendas became interested in politics. During his eventful life, Dimitri Tsafendas learned several languages: Portuguese, English, Greek, Turkish, and Afrikaans. By the age of 16, he had already been fired from several jobs because of his libertarian and communist political views. He lived in Ethiopia for a few months.
In Portugal and Mozambique, Tsafendas was monitored by the PIDE, the Portuguese fascist police. In the 1940s, he entered South Africa illegally and joined the Communist Party. Somehow, he managed to enlist in the U.S. Navy and was sent to fight in the Second World War. After the war ended, he was deported from the United States to Greece. In his father's homeland, Tsafendas fought in the Greek Civil War alongside the Democratic Army.
After the conflict ended, Dimitri Tsafendas went to Portugal, where he was imprisoned for nine months. After his release, Tsafendas moved to Turkey. He later went to Greece, where he learned to make bombs with the Greek partisans. From Greece, he returned to Turkey, where he became an English teacher.
In the 1960s, Tsafendas convinced the Portuguese government that he was no longer a communist. In 1963, he returned to Mozambique, but in 1964 he was arrested at an anti-colonialist, pro-independence rally. When they opened one of the suitcases Tsafendas was carrying, the Portuguese PIDE found Bibles, but also several anti-colonialist and subversive books. The authorities concluded that Tsafendas was pretending to be a missionary in order to spread subversive and anti-colonialist ideas. However, Tsafendas insisted that he was an apostle of Christ. The doctors believed the activist was mentally sound and discharged him. Tsafendas moved to South Africa around 1965.
Assassination of the Prime Minister
September 6, 1966. Parliament, Cape Town, South Africa. That afternoon, H.F. Verwoerd, the powerful Prime Minister of South Africa and the Great Architect of Apartheid, was sitting in his official chair, chatting calmly with his colleagues, who were just as racist and talkative as he was, when Dimitri Tsafendas, at the time an official parliamentary employee, a second-rate bureaucrat in the eyes of those gentlemen, quickly entered the chamber, approached the Prime Minister, drew a large dagger, and delivered deep blows to Verwoerd's chest and neck. Verwoerd died minutes later, choking on his own blood.
Tsafendas was immediately detained. Right there, he was brutally beaten by security guards and members of parliament. Minutes later, Tsafendas was taken to the hospital and then to prison. He revealed the reason for his extreme act to a journalist: worms living inside his stomach. To many, Tsafendas's bizarre statement was clearly a strategy to feign mental illness and perhaps avoid prison. Some time later, Tsafendas offered a far less delusional explanation: killing the Prime Minister would hasten the end of Apartheid.
Dimitri Tsafendas was imprisoned and sent to Robben Island Prison. After the end of Apartheid in 1994, Tsafendas was transferred to a psychiatric hospital. In 1999, South African filmmaker Lisa Key produced a documentary titled *A Question of Madness*, featuring two interviews with Dimitri Tsafendas. In the film, the filmmaker argues that the activist assassinated the Prime Minister for political reasons, not because of insanity.
Dimitri Tsafendas, the communist, libertarian, anti-racist, polyglot, and anti-colonialist who killed the architect of Apartheid, died in 1999 at the age of 81.
REFERÊNCIAS
Tsafendas was not insane. He killed Verwoerd for political reasons: author”. TimesLIVE. 9 November 2018. Retrieved 24 November 2025.
Kenney, Henry (2016). Verwoerd: Architect of Apartheid. Jonathan Ball Publishers. ISBN 978-1-86842-716-1.
Barberá, Marcel Gascón (18 January 2019). “Mad Man? The Greek Who Killed Apartheid’s Architect”. Balkan Insight. Retrieved 13 January 2022.
CARLOS FERREIRA DE ARAUJO JUNIOR – Historiador formado pela UEPB. Publicou dois livros: Renego – Grito Punk (2021), sobre o punk na Paraíba, e Brasil Negro Insurgente (2025), sobre libertários e socialistas negros no Brasil. Desde 2012, possui um canal acervo punk no youtube: ÔKO DO MUNDO!
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