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The man most likely to succeed, however, seemed to be Johannes Balthazar Vorster, 50, the burly Justice Minister who organized Verwoerd's tough, efficient police force and who represents to hundreds of thousands of Afrikaners the thing they want most: security. To haters of apartheid, Vorster would be bad news. He is the hero of the party's militant extreme right wing, which has long thought Verwoerd was doing too much for the blacks.
"I Will Bring Evil." The supreme irony of it all is that Verwoerd's assassin apparently thought so too. Dimitrio Tsafendas had been a drifter who hated the world. He speaks eight languages, has traveled all over the world as a merchant seaman—and has been confined in mental hospitals in both the U.S. and Portugal. He is also a religious fanatic who has dabbled in Buddhism, read the Bible, and often quotes his favorite passage from II Kings: "Thus saith the Lord, Behold, I will bring evil upon this place, and upon the inhabitants thereof."
No one knows much about the killer. Born in Portuguese Mozambique, Tsatendas is said to be the illegitimate son of a mulatto woman and an Egyptian of Greek descent. Despite his mixed blood, he managed to pass himself off as a white, fooled the Verwoerd regime into granting him South African citizenship. Shortly after he was hired as a parliamentary messenger in August, he complained that his $140-a-month salary was not enough for a white man to live on. Verwoerd, he charged, was "doing too much for the coloreds and not enough for the poor whites."
This was an attitude that any white leader of South Africa would have to come to terms with. To Verwoerd, the mixture of baasskap and benevolence came naturally. And evil as it was, it seemed to be a formula that could at least prevent an explosion of racial violence. The question was whether his successor could or would be able to govern in the same fashion.