Schizophrenia of apartheid revisited

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Living in Strange Lands
The Tsafendas Story
By Mary Corrigall

It is fifteen years after apartheid and we are still counting the cost. But the focus has shifted from the physical effects on the collective to the consequences on the individual’s psyche. This approach draws our attention to the insidiousness of this corrupt racial system, which has wormed its way into conceptions of the self.

This aspect is amplified in the case of Dimitri Tsafendas, the Mozambican-born South African who assassinated then-prime minister Dr HR Verwoerd in 1966. The segregationist laws caused a seismic rupture in Tsafendas’ conception of himself.

The progeny of a black woman and white (Greek) man, Tsafendas didn’t readily fall into any of the prescribed racial groups. This had terrible practical consequences for him for most of his life; if he married the person that he loved, a coloured woman called Helen, he would have to be classified as a coloured.

This classification, however, would limit job opportunities, making it that bit harder to support his wife and prospective family. Besides, one senses from this dramatisation of his life that Tsafendas was an activist at heart, who was unwilling to give into the authorities’ rigid laws.

But the apartheid laws didn’t only have an impact on his working and romantic life but on his psyche, causing the ultimate split of the self: schizophrenia, a disease that manifests in multiple personalities. Not that we experience Tsafendas as a double-sided character in this play. Rather he appears like a cohesive persona given to fantasy and delusion as a means of escape from his real-life predicaments.

When we meet Tsafendas (played by Renos Spanoudes) it is towards the end of his journey, shortly after he has been imprisoned. He paces up and down his cell as he relays his life-story.

Though his actions and persona are so obviously a product of racial segregationist policies, ironically, Tsafendas seems to have posed a riddle to the authorities at the time.

Not that the audience is ever privy to the voice of authority. Aside from infrequent visits from an abusive guard who rarely employs verbal communication, Tsafendas remains the audience’s sole source of information.

Given that he is mentally unstable he isn’t a reliable witness either and there are moments when his narration becomes jumpy or irrational or there are blanks in his memory, implying that the truth can never be fully ascertained.

His sanity becomes an important issue: if the assassination was an act of madness then it undercuts the heroism of his attack on Verwoerd, the central architect of apartheid. No doubt the Nationalist government were keen to embrace this explanation.

But given the dehumanising and destructive ideology that Verwoerd propagated, Tsafendas’s act of violence seems reasonable. Certainly the apartheid system was predicated on a brand of madness.

This is juxtaposed with Tsafendas’s state of mind, leaving the audience wondering whether Verwoerd was as disturbed as Tsafendas and pondering on the nature of sanity and how it is temporarily defined.

Driving the narrative is the desire to uncover the conditions and events in Tsafendas’s pitiful life that propelled him to stab Verwoerd repeatedly.

As Tsafendas begins to recount a life of rejection and pain it becomes clear that the attack was simply the culmination of frustration and anger, which sought an outlet and a suitable target, the main architect of his distress and loneliness. In regaling the audience with each painful rejection and drawing attention to his social isolation, writer Anton Krueger quite firmly positions Tsafendas as a victim rather than a perpetrator, implying that the apartheid system caused the roles to become obscured and moral codes to be distorted.

No doubt, if he had had any strong political affiliations (he alludes to once being a member of a communist party) he would have been hailed as a hero and his name would grace a street sign, park or plaque in the new South Africa.

Krueger has reclaimed his position in our history and uncovers the personal cost that apartheid’s mad policies incurred. One can’t help but wonder, however, whether Tsafendas would have found happiness in the so-called Rainbow Nation, where racial and ethnic groups remain voluntarily defined and largely separate and where his fellow Mozambicans have seen their shacks burned to the ground because they “do not belong” .

The issues that this play raises therefore continue to resonate (it was first staged in the early 1990s) and Spanoudes turns in a very convincing and emotive performance, it’s as if he has somehow miraculously channelled the real Tsafendas.

Nevertheless the play isn’t as compelling as it should be; there is no dramatic tension. It runs at an even pace and the visits by the guard serve no purpose except to reiterate how Tsafendas has been persecuted throughout his life.

His assassination of Verwoerd should have been more drawn out: what was the expression on Verwoerd’s face when Tsafendas drove the knife in?

This should have been a vivid scene yet it melds into his life story as if it was an everyday occurrence.

To underpin the tragedy it might have also been interesting to have highlighted the futility of Tsafendas’s attack, even with Verwoerd out of the way the segregationist system he originated continued to flourish. As Benjamin Disraeli, the British prime minister, once quipped: “assassination has never changed the history of the world”.

Living in Strange Lands: The Tsafendas Story showed at the University of Witwatersrand Nunnery Theatre as part of the 969 festival and Arts Alive Festival which run until the end of the month.

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this review first appeared in the sunday independent of 20 september 2009