The Assassin: A Story of Race and Rage in the Land of Apartheid - Hardcover

Van Woerden, Henk; Jacobson, Dan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0805066314 ISBN 13: 9780805066319

Publisher: Metropolitan Books, 2001

Synopsis

The untold and heartbreaking account of the man who killed South Africa's architect of apartheid, one of the most dramatic political assassinations in modern history.

If ever one individual could be said to have embodied the tragedy of apartheid, Dimitri Tsafas would be that man. At a time when color was all, Tsafas, bastard son of a Greek father and an African mother, was untouchable -- too black for the whites and too white for the blacks. Stateless, homeless, and loveless, on September 6, 1966, he entered South Africa's Parliament and stabbed Prime Minister Hrik Verwoerd four times with a long knife, killing the architect of apartheid, the architect of Tsafas's misery.

Now, in a masterful restoration, Henk Van Woerden re-creates the assassin's cursed life and the impossibly torn society that created him. Unwanted by black or white family, denied the right to settle wherever he turns, Tsafas drifts from sea to prison, from kitchen hand to street vor, from Mozambique to Greece and Canada, and back to South Africa. With sensitivity and passion, Van Woerden traces the inexorable road that leads to Verwoerd's death, and reveals that the assassination -- a resounding blow in the war against apartheid -- was not the random act of a crazed individual, but perhaps the only choice left in a country itself gone mad. Powerful, tragic, and compelling, The Assassin is both a devastating indictment of oppression and a cautionary tale of the explosive power of racial hatred everywhere.

About this title

About the Author

Henk Van Woerden, a prizewinning Dutch author, was born in the Netherlands in 1947. He moved to South Africa as a child, studied fine art at the University of Cape Town, and in 1968 returned to Amsterdam, where he lives today. The Assassin has been nominated for two major Dutch awards and translated into five languages.

Reviews

Henk Van Woerden, who has lived in both the Netherlands and South Africa, recreates the intriguing life of Demetrios Tsafendas and his 1966 assassination of apartheid leader Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd in his novel The Assassin (trans. from the Dutch by Dan Jacobson). Nominated for two major Dutch awards and translated into five languages, this story deals masterfully with galvanizing issues of race and power in South Africa under apartheid. With insight and empathy, Van Woerden imagines Tsafendas's torments as a biracial witness to a brutal regime and his progress toward the ultimate gesture of repudiation.
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

In 1966, Hendrik Verwoerd, the Nationalist Prime Minister of South Africa and architect of apartheid, was fatally stabbed by Demitrios Tsafendas, who believed he was instructed to do so by a giant tapeworm in his stomach. Biracial, illegitimate, and rejected by his family, Tsafendas spent the first half of his life in a tragicomedy of statelessness, an aimless odyssey through jobs, countries, and languages. Usually travelling without proper papers, he was repeatedly extradited, imprisoned, and institutionalized. When Van Woerden visits him in a mental hospital, in 1999, shortly before his death, at age eighty-one, the assassin is a disappointment—neither revealingly lucid nor thoroughly mad. But the author persuades us that Tsafendas's mere existence constituted a kind of anti-apartheid, and that in the defining act of his life "the power of madness had … shown itself equal to the madness of power."
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker

Van Woerden, a prizewinning author born in the Netherlands and raised in South Africa, examines the racial subtext of the highly publicized 1966 murder of Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd, the architect of apartheid. South African history has obscured the fact that a colored man in the midst of the post-World War II thrust toward apartheid killed Verwoerd. Van Woerden believes the obscuring of that fact reflects a national amnesia provoked by the traumatic turmoil of apartheid. By exploring the life of the assassin, Demitrios Tsafendas, the author explores the national character of South Africa. Tsafendas, of Greek and African descent, was raised as an "official white" because of his appearance and his father's status. Unable to fit in among blacks or whites, Tsafendas was widely mistrusted and suspected because of his racial ambiguity. Eventually driven mad by his mixed-race heritage in a nation ripped apart by race, Tsafendas tried to end apartheid by ending Verwoerd's life. An excellent look into the human tragedy caused by a dehumanizing system of racial classification and differentiation. Vernon Ford
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Van Woerden, a prize-winning author who lives in Amsterdam, has written a fascinating and chilling biographical study of the man who assassinated South African Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd in 1966. Demitrios Tsafendas, the illegitimate son of a Greek father and a black African mother, grew up without a real family or a real country. Accepted by neither whites nor blacks, he was essentially a drifter. Although feared as a Communist and banned from South Africa, he managed to slip through the cracks in the mid-1960s when he got a menial job working for the South African assembly and fatally stabbed Verwoerd in Parliament. The book, which was excerpted in Granta magazine, is based on extensive interviews with Tsafendas, whom the author characterizes as "a charming chatterbox. A survivor from the detritus of South African history." Highly recommended for public and academic libraries. A.O. Edmonds, Ball State Univ., Muncie, IN
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Metropolitan Books
• Publication date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0805066314
• ISBN 13: 9780805066319
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 208