Hendrik Verwoerd

Stabbed on 6 September 1966 in the House of Assembly in Cape Town by the parliamentary messenger Dimitri Tsafendas; the architect of apartheid died on the chamber floor.

Overview

Verwoerd, prime minister since 1958 and former minister of native affairs, was the chief theoretician of grand apartheid, the architect of the Bantustan system and the Sharpeville-era repression, and the prime minister who took South Africa out of the Commonwealth and declared it a republic. During a parliamentary session Tsafendas, a mixed-race messenger with a long psychiatric history, walked to the front bench and stabbed him four times; he died on the floor of the house. Tsafendas, found not fit to stand trial on grounds that the voices he cited were parasites, was detained as a state patient until his death in 1999. An earlier attempt had wounded Verwoerd in 1960. His death paused nothing: successor Vorster ran the system for another twelve years, but the regime lost its indispensable ideologue.