Mouthful of Glass by Henk van Woerden (Author)

ISBN: 9781868421022

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Jonathan Ball Publishers, January 1, 2000

Paperback, 168 pages

This is an achingly human tale, brilliantly told. When Demitrios Tsafendas stabbed to death President Hendrik Verwoerd in 1966 in the chamber of the South African Parliament, his life became public property. A half-Greek, half-African migrant, born in colonial Mozambique, the murder, for which he was put in a secure hospital for the rest of his life, was the culmination of a lifetime of neglect, wanderlust and disintegration. It was precisely this dysfunctional existence which attracted the novelist Henk van Woerden to a man whose heroes were Jack Dempsey and Buster Keaton, and who believed that his stomach contained a tapeworm that ruled his judgement. Something certainly gave him a prodigious appetite, and something began to gnaw away at Van Woerden, himself a migrant, born in the Netherlands, but raised in Cape Town before returning to the country of his birth. The appeal was of this parallel migrant lifeline, etched out against the backdrop of apartheid and colonialism, to which Tsafendas was anomalous; he spent considerable time trying to get his status changed from white to coloured, and throughout his rootless early life he was trying to get back into South Africa, despite the inequality. His non-linear past is something he shared not only with his adopted homeland (though in his journeying, the sea was his most constant domain), but also with the man he murdered, who was equally obsessed with bloodlines and belonging.
Van Woerden recreates his pitiful life with honed, poetic precision, and invests it with a dignity and coherence it lacked in the living. The passages describing van Woerden's visits to the aged Tsafendas in the Johannesburg hospital where he lived out his days, present and past, are particularly affecting, peaking when the old man, in a moment of rare lucidity, passes him a note on which is written "I regret what happened".