Born in Greece in 1977, Harris Dousemetzis was raised by a mother who was "very politically aware. Since I was very young she talked to me about politics and she was a very passionate supporter of the ANC and the anti-apartheid movement. So I was quite aware of apartheid and had read a few books about it."
When he read the obituary of a man named Dimitri Tsafendas, who had died in a Krugersdorp asylum in 1999, Dousemetzis's interest was piqued: "I saw that he had Greek origins. It caused me some surprise, not only because I had never heard of him in connection to apartheid but also because I had never heard of him in Greece. So this struck me as strange."
Tsafendas, a parliamentary messenger, walked into the House of Assembly on September 6 1966 and stabbed the architect of apartheid, prime minister Hendrik Verwoerd, to death. The official explanation for his actions was that Tsafendas was a troubled man, raised in a broken home and living an itinerant life that took him all over the world as a sailor.
He was in and out of mental institutions where he had claimed to be infested with a tapeworm that was driving him crazy and directing his actions. He was deemed insane by South African authorities during their investigation of the assassination and spent the rest of his life in institutions.
At the time of Tsafendas's death, Dutch journalist Henk van Woerden's award-winning book, A Mouthful of Glass, was the only book dedicated to Tsafendas and maintained the idea that he was a broken man, caught in the cracks of the racial trauma of apartheid, motivated by a psychological breakdown rather than a political determination.
Dousemetzis's curiosity about Tsafendas was not satisfied and after reading an article in the Greek press in which the assassin was described as "the man who killed apartheid", and watching a documentary by Liza Keys, he began to wonder about whether there was more to Tsafendas's story than what had been presented in the court records of the inquiry and the press reports of the time.
CRYING WHEN TALKING
He was intrigued by interviews in the documentary with a number of Greek Orthodox priests who had known Tsafendas. He contacted them and "they all said that Tsafendas was perfectly sane".
"They spoke of him with high praise. Some of them were crying when they were talking about him and describing some of the things they had done together. Hearing the priests speaking so highly of him made me feel strange because in the Greek Orthodox Church the more important sin is to kill someone and Orthodox priests are also quite conservative. So this got me thinking that I should research the case and find more witnesses."
In research for his PhD at Durham University on the gay rights policies of US president Jimmy Carter, Dousemetzis interviewed former presidential candidate and governor of Massachusetts Michael Dukakis, whose investigation of the 1920s executions of anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti led to the uncovering of evidence that exonerated the pair. Dousemetzis told Dukakis about Tsafendas. "He suggested that I should give the evidence to the authorities."
Dousemetzis wrote a report comprising five years of archival and interview research on the Tsafendas case. This was presented to several leading South African jurists including George Bizos, Zak Yacoob, John Dugard, Dumisa Ntsebeza and Krish Govender. All agreed that there was sufficient evidence for a review of the original findings in the case.
That report became the basis for Dousemetzis's recently published book, Dimitri Tsafendas - The Man Who Killed Apartheid. It is the result of nine years of research and makes the case for the assassination as a planned political act carried out by a highly intelligent and dedicated fighter for justice who manufactured the story of the tapeworm to save himself from the gallows.
In his journey across the world in search of the real Dimitri Tsafendas, Dousemetzis found that "all the interviews were substantiated by the archives, and this was a complete shock to me because I thought that in the archives I would find evidence to support the insanity claims".
"I was absolutely shocked to find in Portugal, in Lisbon, in the national archives, that PIDE, the Portuguese security police, had a huge file on Tsafendas and that they had lied to the South African police about him, telling them that they had no file on him and downplaying his political activities. The authorities did whatever was possible to misrepresent his political past and this can be easily proved by hundreds of documents."
In a twisted South African coincidence, perhaps the assassin whom Tsafendas most mirrors is Chris Hani's killer, Janusz Walus, who believed that by gunning down the Umkhonto we Sizwe and South African Communist Party leader he would incite a civil war and end post-apartheid reconciliation.
Tsafendas was a member of the SACP and the descendant of Cretan rebels from the Greek war of independence against Turkey. Dousemetzis said Tsafendas believed that killing Verwoerd would smash apartheid.
'VERWOERD GOT WHAT HE DESERVED'
"He did not succeed because apartheid lasted another 24 years, and Tsafendas said that he agreed he didn't expect apartheid to last that long but at least Verwoerd got what he deserved."
Dousemetzis hopes that "from now on the historical books will refer to Tsafendas as a sane man who killed Verwoerd for political reasons and that people will refer to him as such".
"I want people to acknowledge that this was a political act. A lot of lies have been told about Tsafendas in the press and by the commission and in the courts, and I think if you read the book you can see he was not the person he was portrayed to be."..