Necklacing is a method of extrajudicial summary execution and torture carried out by forcing a rubber tire drenched with gasoline around a victim's chest and arms, and setting it on fire. It’s a part of South African history we usually don’t talk about.
Burning tyre protest in South Africa. Source: Wikipedia
This was the weapon of the men and women who fought against apartheid in South Africa; the people who rose up in arms with Nelson Mandela to turn their country into a place where they would be treated as equals. They were fighting for a good cause and so history can gloss over some of the dirty details. Necklacing was a horrible way to die. Mobs would put a car tire around the arms and neck of their victim, wrapping them up in a twisted parody of a rubber necklace. Usually, the massive weight of a tire was enough to keep them from running, but some took it even further.
Then they would set their victims on fire. While the flames rose and seared their skin, the tire around their necks would melt and cling like boiling tar to their flesh. Hundreds died this way with tires around their necks, fire searing their skin, and the smoke of burning tar choking their lungs. It took a psychological toll. That same year, South Africa held its first equal and open elections. The fight to end apartheid was finally over.
Necklacing was a fate reserved for traitors. Few, if any, white men died with a car tire around necks. Instead, it would be members of the black community, usually ones who swore they were part of the fight for freedom but who had lost the trust of their friends. Maki Skosana’s death was the first to be filmed by a news crew. They grabbed her while she was mourning at a funeral for the dead. But Skosana wasn’t the first to be burned alive. The first necklacing victim was a politician named Tamsanga Kinikini, who had refused to resign after accusations of corruption. Anti-apartheid activists had already been burning people alive for years.
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“It works,” one young man told a reporter when he was challenged to justify burning a man alive. Desmond Tutu, in particular, was passionate about it. A few days before Maki Skosana was burned alive, he physically fought off a whole mob to keep them from doing the same thing to another informant. “If you do this kind of thing, I will find it difficult to speak for the cause of liberation,” Rev. Tutu said after the video of Skosana hit the airwaves. The rest of the African National Congress, though, didn’t share his dedication. Other than making a few comments for the record, they didn’t do much to stop it.
“We don’t like necklacing, but we understand its origins,” A.N.C. President Oliver Tambo would eventually admit. Though the A.N.C. spoke out against it on paper, Nelson Mandela’s wife, Winnie Mandela, publically and openly cheered the mobs on. As far as she was concerned, necklacing wasn’t just a justifiable evil. “We have no guns - we have only stone, boxes of matches and petrol,” she once told a crowd of cheering followers. Her words made the A.N.C. nervous. They were willing to look the other way and let this happen, but they had an international PR war to win. Winnie Nelson herself admitted she was emotionally harder than most, but she blamed the government for the person she’d become.
It was the years in prison, she would say, that had made her embrace violence. “What brutalized me so much was that I knew what it is to hate,” she would later say.
Necklacing lived on as a way of taking out rapists and thieves. In 2015, a group of five teenage boys was necklaced for getting in a bar fight. In 2018, a pair of men were killed for a suspected theft. And those are just a few examples. Today, five percent of the murders in South Africa are the result of vigilante justice, often committed through necklacing. The justification they use today is a chilling echo of what they said in the 1980s. “It does reduce crime,” one man told a reporter after burning a suspected robber alive.
Origins and Context
The practice of placing a petrol-soaked tire around the neck of an individual and setting it alight ('necklacing') was most pronounced during the mid-1980s when South Africa experienced intense resistance against apartheid, largely led by the exiled ANC and the United Democratic Front (UDF). It remains unclear as to the exact origins of the use of the terms 'necklace' and 'necklacing'. They appear to have entered the South African lexicon and political discourse from around September 1985.
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The practice, a manifestation of political violence, emerged predominantly in townships. Initially, those targeted were allegedly persons suspected of collaboration, either as spies or as functionaries of the apartheid state. Later, however, the lines became blurred between those suspected of collaboration and the use of the practice in deflecting the motives of murders not politically motivated. Between 400 and 700 persons are reported to having been killed by the necklace during the mid- to late 1980s.
According to Ball, the first widely reported instance of necklacing was the killing of Thamsanqa Benjamin Kinikini from KwaNobuhle, Eastern Cape, on 23 March 1985. Kinikini, a member of the local town council, was allegedly involved in corruption and violence, and had refused to resign from his position, unlike some of his colleagues. He was also accused of participating in the abduction of United Democratic Front (UDF) youths. Five of his sons and nephews were killed alongside him. The incident received significant media coverage, including footage by Dutch television showing a crowd chanting and dancing around his burning body. This publicity may have contributed to the escalation of the practice in the following period.
Liberation Strategies and the Rise of Violence
Around the same time as the state adopted 'total strategy' in the late 1970s, the ANC produced The Green Book, a report on lessons learnt from the Vietnamese liberation struggle. This report placed emphasis on the strengthening of the underground and the building of mass organisations. The role of MK would be to escalate the armed struggle, but as a form of political armed propaganda 'whose immediate purpose [was] to support and stimulate political activity and organisation rather than to hit at the enemy'.
Violence, while still central to what was conceived of as the seizure of state power, would be the result of a mass revolutionary insurrectionary strategy (a 'people's war'), and in so far as MK would continue to play a leading role, this would be primarily political not military.
The early 1980s saw significant mass mobilisation and organisation, including the launch in August 1983 of the UDF, a front of organisations that provided a broad organisational framework as well as symbolic coherence to anti-apartheid resistance. The UDF, though ambivalently, propagated non-violence: the forms of resistance, largely led by the UDF, varied from rent boycotts that had begun in late 1984, to bus and food boycotts, worker stay-aways and school boycotts.
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Following the boycott of black local elections in September 1984, there was escalating conflict between mobilised masses, mostly youth and students, and security forces. As political strife spread across the country, the UDF declared 1985 'From Protest to Challenge' and in January 1985 the ANC called on South Africans to 'Render South Africa Ungovernable'. By July 1985 the state had declared a partial State of Emergency and on 12 July 1986 a national State of Emergency. This led to widespread detentions, a significant and increasing number of deaths as a result of security force action in protest or street violence, cross-border raids and more sinister forms of covert action.
The first report of necklace killings, those of Councillor Benjamin Kinikini and his family members, and of Maki Skosana emerged in early 1985 in this context of a rising tide of mass political strife. At its Kabwe Conference in June 1985, the ANC approved a new and intensified mass-based resistance strategy for a 'People's War'. At the same time, it provided some legitimacy for attacks on 'soft targets' such as prominent government supporters, border area farmers, civil defence workers, state witnesses and police informers.
Winnie Mandela. Source: The Guardian
The Ambivalence of Condemnation and Condonation
Despite the significance of necklacing in struggle history, contemporary recollections of its condemnation are often (re)presented in a way that ignores the ambivalence which characterised the liberation struggle's discourse on necklacing. There never was an unequivocal condemnation or condonation of necklacing on the part of the ANC and UDF. Tambo and other ANC and UDF leaders condemned necklacing but did not condemn those, 'the masses', who partook in the practice. This wavering between condemnation and condonation was exacerbated by the apartheid state mainly setting the discursive terrain on the practice of necklacing.
The ANC and UDF were constrained through responding to the state's discursive formation rather than setting this formation themselves. The ANC had to justify politically its recourse to violence, while at the same time secure its position as the holder of the moral high ground within a war of propaganda between the state and itself. For the state necklace killing was not political violence. It was not rendered explicable as an act of resistance and could not be rationalised. The practice represented 'black-on-black' violence, a criminal activity, a form of barbarism and savagery.
The state accused the ANC, in particular, of supporting, instigating, condoning and rationalising necklacing. This led to debate about the 'politics of ownership' in relation to the practice. State accusations arose in relation to the mixed responses regarding the rise of the practice, evident from the statements made by prominent ANC and UDF leaders. The state emphasised any public statements made by ANC and UDF leaders that seemingly supported the practice whilst ignoring those that condemned it.
If the state set the discursive terrain on the practice of necklacing in the 1980s, this was in the absence of a clear response from the liberation movements. Indeed, the ANC and UDF have been accused of 'a shameful shuffling of feet around the issue of the necklace'. However, the escalation of necklace killings from July 1985 meant that the issue could not be avoided. Leading figures in the ANC and UDF made a number of key statements regarding attacks on collaborators, which included necklace killings.
Besides the infamous Winnie Mandela statement, '[w]ith our boxes of matches and necklaces, we will liberate this country', amongst the more prominent were those of Mosiuoa Lekota, Trevor Manuel, Oliver Tambo and Chris Hani, chief of staff of Umkhonto weSizwe (Spear of the Nation - MK).
A Prose of Ambivalence
There were several ways in which public positions on necklace killings tended to produce a prose of ambivalence. Firstly, the ANC and UDF were caught in a double bind in that they could not explicitly condemn the practice and risk losing their mass support base, or explicitly condone the practice and risk losing the support of important internal and international constituencies. Consequently, both organisations struggled to formulate a position without giving the state the upper hand in a discursive war on the moral and political legitimacy of using violence.
This ambivalence was not merely a tactical one. For underpinning the dominant liberation discourse on necklacing was an inherent formulation of the binary of resistance and oppression/repression. Understood within this framework, necklacing was rendered causally as resistance arising from state oppression/ repression. Ambivalence about necklacing, I suggest, was produced in the interstice of the resistance-repression binary.
In conclusion, the history of necklacing in South Africa is a complex and disturbing one, marked by violence, ambivalence, and the struggle for liberation. The legacy of this practice continues to haunt the nation, raising difficult questions about justice, reconciliation, and the long-term effects of political violence.
How did South African Apartheid happen, and how did it finally end? - Thula Simpson
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