The assassination of Hendrik Verwoerd: the spectre of Apartheid's corpse

Verwoerd's assassination in 1966, his tenth year as Prime Minister, reverberated with intense symbolic significance. Deriving partly from his personally elevated standing within the polity, the crisis of meaning also arose because 'the great leader' was felled with the apartheid state at the zenith of its power and ideological confidence-and yet unable to protect its sovereign's life. How to give coherent, redemptive meaning to this became all the more challenging when confronted by the prospect of mentally unstable, incoherent assassin, who had been barely visible in the Houses of Parliament where he wielded the lethal knife. Drawing largely on a close reading of the commission of inquiry appointed to investigate the assassination, this article considers the symbolic challenge confronted by the apartheid regime, showing it to be one that was not consistently mastered. Confronted with evidence of the assassin's marginality and dislocation, the commission's overwhelming finding was the lethal porosity and vulnerability of the apartheid state itself, pushing the commission to the brink of the unsettling, if still subliminal, finding of national suicide. In the final analysis, the commission resisted the forensic logic of its investigations, stipulating a suitably demonic version of an evil assassin who felled Verwoerd in an epic struggle of good versus evil - only to have it overturned by the judge who presided over Tsafendas' trial. Tsafendas' confinement to Death Row, despite having been declared a 'meaningless creature' by the judge, restated the symbolic ambiguity that continued to attach to the meaning of Verwoerd's corpse.