In my early teens, I discovered a book one afternoon in my dad’s large collection of books about his father: The Assassination of Dr Verwoerd.4 I remember my heart beating faster as I impatiently turned the pages to get to the chapter describing the actual assassination. My imaginings of Oupa Hendrik’s bloodstained final moments were formed, then, by a witness report and the memories of his fervent supporters.
“Having found a firm footing, Tsafendas stabbed the Prime Minster three more times – one in the left shoulder, one in the upper right arm and another in the left side of his chest, where he had inflicted the first stab-wound on Dr Verwoerd. One penetrated the left ventricle of the heart, others the lungs. There was also a cut in the colon. The wounds were inflicted so quickly that it was difficult to distinguish between one stab and the next,” the report in the cabinet reads.
My parents kept the dark suit and white shirt for many years, I recently discovered. The thought made me very uncomfortable. Why? An ingrained, human aversion to spilled blood? Did I inherit my mother’s blood phobia?
Standing together in front of that display cupboard, I recalled to Pumla a conversation I’d recently had with my mother. I’d asked her what had happened to the clothes my grandfather had worn on the day of his murder. My mother was sitting at my parents’ dining table, with an unobstructed view of Stellenbosch Mountain.
“Well, Oupa was buried on the 10th of September, a Saturday. On Tuesday, the 13th, two policemen arrived at our front door with a suitcase. They said they’d brought something for Pa which they expected would be important to him. One of them opened the suitcase. It contained a crinkled suit, covered in bloodstains. I turned away immediately – I couldn’t face it …”
My mother, in her late eighties, glanced with a heavy sigh at her beloved mountain and shook her head.
Everything was in the suitcase, even the underwear and shoes he’d worn. But what was to be done with the bloodstained clothes? The advice from Kotie Roodt, then head of the Pretoria Museum for Cultural History, was to use cold water, no soap, immediately, to get rid of the blood. This would keep fish moths at bay.
“Cold water, cold water, cold water … until you’re sure there’s no more blood in the fibres of the suit. Pa asked me to do the washing, because he was not up to it. I had no choice. I gave you three boys your bath and put you to bed, then I filled the bath, pushed the clothes under the water and left them to soak overnight. The next morning, when everyone was off to work and school … though only Hendrik was at school at that time …”
“So, Dirk and I were there? I was in the house?”
“Well, you were only two years old, so of course you weren’t aware of anything. Neither was Dirk. I stuck my hands in the water, pulled out the plug, and filled the bath again … pressed and pressed and pressed … no rubbing, only pressing was allowed.”
The water continued to turn red no matter how often she repeated the process. She was only satisfied after a few days and many more cold-water baths.
“I called your father to come and make sure the clothes are actually clean. He checked after work and said, ‘Yes, it looks like you managed to get rid of all the blood.’”
The clothes had to be hung out to dry dripping wet, in the shade of a tree (“the advice was no sun”) and straightened by hand. My father’s help was needed to carry the heavy basin outside. Once dry, they were carefully folded and, protected against fish moths, stored in a suitcase in their bedroom cupboard. Every few years, they would open the suitcase to make sure the clothes were alright, and to replace the poison.
My mother told me it was a terrible job. “That smell of blood. I will never forget it.”
I suspect I received my fear of blood through my mother’s milk. As a parent I even struggled to handle my children’s bloody cuts and bruises.
“And your hands … your hands …” my mother said. “Soap and soap and soap and soap and more soap …”
“But the smell remained?”
“Yes, it lingered. Working all that time with the bloody water, the smell soaked into my skin.”
My parents never told anyone, not my father’s siblings, nor his mother, about the clothes.
When I told Pumla this story, she said: “I feel for your mother.”
I could taste the sincerity of her compassion. I was profoundly moved by her purified ubuntu, on this cold winter’s afternoon in Orania, in the Verwoerd Memorial House. The warm, unearned empathy of this black South African woman towards a member of my Verwoerd family felt like big drops of cool water on hidden, parched bits of my soul. Pumla’s compassion, coupled with my mother’s vivid memories, lit a humanising candle in my deep-self. The two of them became midwives of a more thorough acceptance that the man of granite, as he was known, had also been a real human being – a fragile person with skin, lungs, a colon and a heart; a mere mortal with vulnerable flesh and lots of blood.
Pumla
A few years after visiting Orania together, I asked Pumla what she’d felt standing in front of the display cabinet.
“I was deeply affected by the story of your mother … even now, in fact, I am holding back tears. What she had to go through. What struck me the most was the repetition – the clothes had to be washed again and again. And at the same time she had to hide it from you and your brothers as young children.”
Twenty years ago, I became familiar with Pumla’s generosity of spirit within the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). She was a member of the Human Rights Violations Committee and I served in the Research Department.5 We share a faith commitment to help heal, rather than pass on, collective, historical trauma.
As we reflected on our Orania visit, she remembered something from her 1960s childhood in Langa, a black township outside Cape Town. It gave me an unsettling glimpse of just how far apart we grew up.
“It was right after the assassination. As I remember, we were ten or eleven years old; young girls with short dresses, singing and dancing in the street. I only remember the joyful, taunting way we sang the refrain … ‘ndisuka tsafenda, nduke tsafende…ndisuka tsafenda, nduke tsafende’ … and you make an action,” she demonstrated with a moving arm, “like you are stabbing with a knife. It means: ‘I will stab you like Tsafendas’.”
I will “tsafendas” you.
It’s a striking image. It’s difficult to hear. I struggle to articulate how it makes me feel.
It’s the second time I’ve heard that “tsafendas” became a verb for fellow South Africans.
Dudley Adolph grew up in a mixed township on the East Rand of Johannesburg, far from Pumla’s Langa. He’d told me: “Verwoerd … in our township was like a … like a swear name. We would refer to him as a ‘dog’ … ‘because of Verwoerd, look at these conditions, because of Verwoerd …’ But you didn’t dare say anything against him because you were fearful of the security police. Everybody knew who had killed him. I remember when he was stabbed. It was like a big party. From then on, ‘tsafenda’ [or ‘tsafendas’] became slang for stabbing someone.”
For many, many fellow South Africans, across our country, 6 September 1966 was a day to dance and celebrate. While I was working within the TRC, a piece of protest art from the early 1960s unexpectedly deepened my understanding.
I had become disillusioned with the white Dutch Reformed Church (DRC) in the mid-Eighties and, since the TRC offices in Cape Town were just around the corner from St George’s Anglican Cathedral, that had become my place of worship.
In my diary of that time, I reflected on my attendance of a votive mass for reconciliation and healing.
17 November 1997
Glenda Wildschut (TRC Commissioner, who