MICHAEL SCHMIDT: Killing a leader does not kill their ideas

Every time I visit the dark, panelled chamber of the former House of Assembly in parliament I make a point to sit in the heavily stuffed emerald green chair where the architect of grand apartheid, Hendrik Verwoerd, once sat. 

Under the whitewashed vaulted ceiling, inhaling the scent of antique polished wood and brass fittings, I take a few moments to conjure up Verwoerd’s assassination by Greek-Mozambican parliamentary messenger Dimitri Tsafendas on September 6 1966. 

The clipping of the ear of US presidential hopeful Donald Trump by a would-be assassin’s assault rifle round a little over a week ago got me thinking about whether the assassinations of top political leaders ever fundamentally changed the policy directions of the states they led. History suggests not. 

Back in 1966, taking place as it did in front of a full house with a packed press gallery and schoolchildren looking down from the public gallery above, the news of the fatal stabbing of the “Man of Granite”, as the BBC called him while struggling to pronounce his surname as “Fur-wood,” echoed around the pre-internet world by telex and radio. 

Because he was widely seen as the man morally responsible for the Sharpeville Massacre of March 21 1960, which left a reported 69 people dead — new research by academics Nancy Clarke and William Worger indicates that the actual number was closer to 91 — Verwoerd’s assassination was hailed by the global anti-apartheid movement as a heroic act.  

Johnny Makhathini, the ANC’s head of international affairs at the time, predicted “the beginning of the end for apartheid”. Others were not so sure. Interviewed by the BBC in London after the killing, exiled Drum magazine journalist William “Bloke” Modisane said: “Dr Verwoerd, the man, has died ... Dr Verwoerd the ideals and ideas of the man, have not died... I don’t think it will get better, it may get worse, actually.”

Modisane was to be proved correct. Verwoerd’s assassination heightened the bunker mentality of the apartheid regime. Within 20 years it would be run by a shadowy securocrat deep state centred on PW Botha that would take armoured personnel carriers into black townships to brutally suppress resistance. 

The Verwoerd assassination was deliberately depoliticised by the authorities. Tsafendas was falsely portrayed by the prosecution at his trial as a schizophrenic who allegedly took instruction from a tapeworm, and so was acquitted of murder by reason of insanity and detained for life at the state president’s pleasure.  

He died aged 81 on October 7 1999 after 33 years in custody, and was quietly buried in an unmarked grave on the grounds of the Sterkfontein Psychiatric Hospital in Krugersdorp, unrecognised by the anti-apartheid movement that Makhathini claimed he had inspired. 

That has since changed thanks to the 1999 Liza Key documentary A Question of Madness, based on interviews she conducted with an octogenarian Tsafendas in custody, and the 2018 book The Man Who Killed Apartheid: The Life of Dimitri Tsafendas  by Harris Dousemetzis and Gerry Loughran. 

Their book was based on exhaustive archival research and interviews by Dousemetzis that irrefutably demonstrated the assassin’s clarity of mind and lifelong communist commitment to antiracism and national liberation. 

Yet even while endorsing that research, legal expert and academic John Dugard admitted: “ Political assassinations seldom achieve their goal and this was no exception. But at least SA history should know the truth about Tsafendas.” 

In the US today, following the attempted shooting of Trump by 20-year-old Thomas Crooks, a youth of uncertain politics, journalists are reaching back to previous assassinations of leading figures to try to draw lessons and comparisons. The one that most readily springs to most minds, because it is within living memory, is that of US president John F Kennedy in 1963, thanks in part to the place it holds in US national, or at least Democrat, myth as the end of a golden era.

That myth has been burnished by theories of a second shooter on the grassy knoll, his tracks covered by communist fall guy Lee Harvey Oswald shooting from the book depository. This has generated continuous loops of conspiracy theories of such force that the CIA, which is credited by some as having orchestrated the shooting, maintains a web page dedicated to trying to debunk the claim.  

In 2007 Rolling Stone magazine carried a 10-page feature in which a son of former CIA operative E Howard Hunt claimed his father, who had gained notoriety for his involvement in everything from the Bay of Pigs fiasco to the Watergate scandal, admitted to him before his death that vice-president Lyndon B Johnson had ordered the hit on JFK and that the fatal shot was taken from the grassy knoll by French criminal Lucien Sarti, who was subsequently killed in a drug raid in Mexico City in 1972. 

But whoever was truly responsible, the killing did nothing to slow the US’s aggressive anti-communist foreign policy, which had taken the world to the brink of nuclear war under JFK with the Cuban missile crisis. In particular, Johnson actively widened US involvement in the Vietnam War and continued to prop up Augusto Pinochet’s neo-fascist regime in Chile. 

Johnson’s presidency also saw widespread race riots across the US, particularly in the wake of another assassination, that of civil rights leader Martin Luther King in 1968 by criminal James Earl Ray. Yet again the killing provided rich sources of conspiracy theories and Hollywood fiction. 

But just as the 1993 assassination of SA Communist Party leader Chris Hani (more a Malcolm X than an MLK type martyr) by Janusz Waluś took our nation to the brink of civil war yet failed to derail the dawning of multiracial democracy a year later, the murder of King actually cemented the victory of legal desegregation in the US by the end of 1968. 

Earlier US assassinations also enforce the rule of post-killing policy acceleration. For example, the infamous murder of abolitionist president Abraham Lincoln by Confederate nostalgic John Wilkes Booth in 1865 signally failed to halt the abolition of slavery under the Reconstruction Acts. 

As Modisane so presciently noted back in 1966, killing a leader does not kill their ideas. 

• Schmidt is a veteran journalist and author.