A Question of Madness

In 1966, Dimitri Tsafendas assassinated the then South-African prime minister Hendrik Verwoerd. Verwoerd is considered the political architect of apartheid, and Tsafendas was one of his most fervent opponents. As with many other attempts on important statesmen, a myth was created around this murder. Tsafendas was allegedly acting under other people’s orders, and initially he himself claimed that he had been manipulated by a talking ‘tapeworm‘ in his stomach.From this film portrait, Tsafendas - who was born in 1918 as the son of a Greek father and an African mother - emerges as an intelligent, albeit rather eccentric adventurer, who was fluent in eight languages and travelled all over the world before settling down in Africa in 1964. He was in prison for 28 years under extremely dreadful conditions, but was released in 1994 and is still alive today. The writer Breyten Breytenbach describes the agonies Tsafendas was subjected to and brackets him together with Nelson Mandela. Tsafendas himself is also introduced in the film. Apparently, he suffered from an inferiority complex and at a later age conceived a mortal hatred for Verwoerd. Whether this was the reason for the killing is not cleared up in the film.