'A Mouthful of Glass' recreates the sad and desperate life of a man who was never sure what he was and where he stood. One day in 1966, in the chamber of the South African Parliament where he had recently been employed as a messenger, he walked up to Hendrik Verwoerd, the Prime Minister, and stabbed him to death. Verwoerd was the father of apartheid; his was among the most dramatic political assassinations in modern history.
Demitrios Tsafendas was born half-Greek, half-African, in colonial Mozambique, a world defined by racial prejudice. Van Woerden describes the man's flight from country to country - Egypt, Greece, Turkey, Portugal, Germany, Britain and the USA - and his failure to fit in anywhere. He was christian, communist, coloured, black, white; he was, sometimes, the prophet of multi-racial future. Rejection and disintegration went together; by the end he was taking orders from creatures dwelling in his body. Was he mad, or was the madness outside him?
