It was a bright and balmy spring afternoon in Cape Town. In the public gardens beside the South African House of Assembly, brown squirrels scampered through the oak trees, and white men lazed comfortably on the benches marked "Europeans Only." Inside the paneled assembly chamber, Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd strode down the aisle, took his green leather seat on the front bench and, in a gesture that had become automatic, touched the fingers of his left hand to a small scar on his jaw, all that remained of the assassin's bullet that had nearly killed him in 1960. Verwoerd was in high spirits. He was about to make his first major speech of the session, and for the occasion he had had his hair cut.
In the hall at the rear of the chamber stood a large man in his late 40s. He had curly grey hair, swarthy skin and silver-capped front teeth. His name was Dimitrio Tsafendas, and he wore the uniform of a parliamentary messenger, a job for which he had been hired only a month before. Tsafendas was obviously distraught. At lunch with his fellow messengers, he had hardly touched his curry, left early without explanation. Now, as the warning bell summoned the Members of Parliament to their seats for the opening of the session, he refused to run a routine errand requested by a local newsman. "I have something to do," he muttered. Then, with a six-inch dagger concealed in his right hand and two stilettos tucked in his belt, Tsafendas walked into the chamber.
Familiar Approach. In the press gallery above, Political Columnist Stanley Uys of the Johannesburg Sunday Times watched the messenger elbow his way through milling Assemblymen and approach Verwoerd. "I thought he was going to pat Dr. Verwoerd on the back," said Uys. "I thought he was being excessively familiar. Then I saw the knife."
Without uttering a word, Tsafendas drew the dagger out of its leather sheath, plunged it three times into Verwoerd's chest and once into his neck. The House looked on in horror, too stunned to move. Verwoerd tried to raise one arm to protect himself, then, confused, used it to brush back his hair. He slumped over, blood spurting through his shirt.
Several Assemblymen grabbed Tsafendas and wrestled him to the floor. Others, including three doctors, rushed to try to revive Verwoerd. But it was to no avail. Dr. Hendrik Frensch Verwoerd, architect of apartheid and South Africa's Prime Minister for eight years, was dead—just two days short of his 65th birthday.
Divine Instrument. His nation was stunned. In the cities, whites and blacks fought for copies of the newspaper extras that brought the first word of the assassination. In Johannesburg, a bus driver saw the headlines, stopped his bus, and fainted at the wheel. A quarter of a million South Africans, black as well as white, stood silently on the streets of Pretoria while his funeral procession filed past. Hundreds of thousands of whites flocked to their churches for solace. "May the God in whom we believe make clear to us in his own time what this horrible event is to signify to our country and her people," intoned Cape Town's Afrikaans-language Die Burger in an anguished editorial. "Now, we cannot fathom it."