Dimitri Tsafendas

Several members of his family were Cretan rebels during the Great Cretan Revolution (1866-1869), while his father was a passionate anarchist.

At the age of 16, Tsafendas began to work at various jobs, and was dismissed from one of them "owing to his Communist leanings" and after he was suspected of being "engaged in disseminating Communistic propaganda."

When he was 20, the Portuguese security police, PIDE, opened a file on Tsafendas after discovering that he had twice distributed Communist propaganda.

Dimitri Tsafendas (Δημήτρης Τσαφέντας; 14 January 1918 – 7 October 1999) was a Greek-Mozambican lifelong political militant and the assassin of Prime Minister of South Africa Hendrik Verwoerd.

He returned to Mozambique four years later; then, at the age of ten, moved to Transvaal, where he attended Middelburg Primary School from 1928 to 1930.

He then returned to Mozambique and attended a church school for the next two years.

Tsafendas was familiar with politics from an early age.

Banned from entering South Africa, where his family had gone to live in the late 1930s, and Mozambique, Tsafendas spent the next 12 years of his life in exile.

During these years, he applied at least once a year for permission to enter Mozambique or South Africa, but all his applications were refused because of his Communist status and his political activities in Mozambique in the 1930s.

Constantly harassed in Portugal by PIDE and the Portuguese police, Tsafendas roamed across Europe and the Middle East, working and visiting places that interested him.

During his wanderings, he picked up eight languages.

Upon his arrival, he was arrested and interrogated by the police about his political activities in Mozambique in 1938.

He was imprisoned for nine months in the two most notorious Portuguese prisons for political offenders, the Barca d'Alva and the Aljube Prison.

In 1939, Tsafendas entered South Africa illegally and joined the South African Communist Party.

He became a seaman in the US merchant marine in 1941 and served aboard American ships during World War II.

While in the United States, Tsafendas became a member of a religious sect known as the Two by Twos.

In 1947, the US immigration authorities deported Tsafendas to Greece, then in the throes of the Greek Civil War.

Tsafendas joined the Democratic Army, the military wing of the Greek Communist Party, and fought with them against the royalists.

Shortly before the war ended in defeat for the Communists, Tsafendas made his way to Portugal.

In October 1951, Tsafendas travelled by sea to Lourenço Marques, but was refused entry because of his past political activities and for being a known Communist, and was deported back to Portugal.

While in Turkey in 1961, he worked for some six months as a teacher of English at the Limasollu Naci College, a prestigious private language institute in Istanbul, and upon eventually securing his return to South Africa, he worked for a time as a translator at Durban Court.

In 1962, during a visit to Crete to see his father's and ancestors' birthplace, he met some former World War II Greek partisans who had participated in the kidnapping of German general Heinrich Kreipe.

They trained him in bomb-making.

In 1963, Tsafendas was granted amnesty by Portugal after he convinced them that he was a reformed man and no longer a Communist, and he was eventually allowed to return to Mozambique.

A year later, Tsafendas was arrested while addressing local people in favour of independence for the colonial territory.

In a suitcase containing anti-colonialist and Communist literature, Tsafendas also had several Bibles.

He told the police he was not advocating independence but preaching Christianity.

The Portuguese were not convinced, and he was charged with "pretending to be a missionary spreading the word about religion" while actually preaching "under the guise of religion in favour of Mozambique's independence".

According to PIDE's interrogation transcript, "When asked to describe all of the subversive activities that he has been developing against the Country and in favour of Mozambique's independence, he answered: That, he hasn't been developing any kind of such subversive activities against the Country, neither in favour of Mozambique's independence. However, wishes to clarify that he supports, as a Mozambican, the idea of Mozambique's independence, governed by the natives of that Province, whether they are black or white."

The Portuguese were not convinced that Tsafendas was telling the truth, and he was imprisoned.

After three months in custody, Tsafendas claimed that he was in fact a missionary, Saint Peter.

He was taken to a hospital, where he convinced the Portuguese doctors that he really believed he was Christ's foremost apostle and was therefore considered to be insane.

He was released from prison custody and soon afterwards released from the hospital.

In 1965, Tsafendas returned to South Africa.

Shortly before the assassination, he applied for reclassification from "White" to "Coloured" but his application was turned down.

On 6 September 1966, while working as a parliamentary messenger, Tsafendas stabbed Verwoerd — commonly regarded as the architect of apartheid — to death during a sitting of the House of Assembly in Cape Town.

Tsafendas was born in Lourenço Marques (today's Maputo) in Mozambique, then a colony of Portugal.

His parents were Michalis Tsafandakis (Μιχάλης Τσαφαντάκης, also spelled Miguel Tsafandakis), a Greek marine engineer with anarchist leanings from Kitharida, a small village near Heraklion, Crete, and Amelia Williams, a Mozambican woman of mixed race.

He was sent to Egypt when he was three to live with his grandmother and his aunt.

In July 1966, at the age of 48, Tsafendas obtained a temporary position as a parliamentary messenger in the House of Assembly in Cape Town.