NECKLACING

In the town square, a man lies with his hands bound and bloodied, screaming as he burns slowly to death, his face blackened by the fire and rubber melting across his chest. The residents of his village observe, knowing that traitors will ultimately have to pay this price. Although this scene of brutal torture sounds appropriate for the Middle Ages, it happened in the 1980s. Even worse, everything was recorded on camera.

Today, we're going to examine necklacing, which is undoubtedly one of the worst penalties ever. Despite its innocent name, necklacing is among the most severe acts of self-defence and vigilante violence that have been used in the 20th century.

The name comes from the fact that the victim's hands are either completely severed or tied with barbed wire before a rubber tire is soaked in gasoline and wrapped around their head and torso like a huge necklace. The victim then dies an agonizingly slow death after the tire is set on fire.

Because of the rubber tire, people are not only at risk of burns from the fire itself but also of breathing in smoke and getting covered in boiling, melting rubber while the tire burns. Fueled by gasoline, the fire burns even after death, only putting out when the body is reduced to an unrecognizable husk.

Necklacing has a brief history; some of its early instances are documented from Sri Lanka's anti-Tamil riots in the 1960s.

Former Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide was known to order this punishment to be applied to his political adversaries in the 1990s and early 2000s. Another variation of this used by drug dealers in Brazil is known as "the microwave," in which their victims are forced into a tall stack of burning tires.

However, the most notorious instance of necklacing used as a torture method dates back to South Africa in the 1980s, when it first appeared as a form of protest against apartheid's inhumanity.

In South Africa and Namibia, apartheid was an institutionalized system of racial segregation that persisted from the 1940s until the early 1990s. Although apartheid was officially instituted during the 1948 general election, its origins can be traced back to the Dutch East India Company's 1652 invasion of South Africa.

European-run corporations battled the indigenous in many African and American nations over resources such as coffee, rubber, precious metals, and, during the era of chattel slavery, human beings.

Entire communities were uprooted during the 17th-century Khoikhoi-Dutch conflicts to make room for Dutch-owned farms. These farms used a mixture of white labourers and slaves from other African nations that were under Dutch rule.

After the British Empire took control of the coast in 1795, the Dutch and British fought for control of the area since it included a vital port on the route connecting Europe and India. As a result of this struggle, colonized South Africa evolved as a fusion of Dutch and British cultures. Although the area was partially governed by English Common Law, it did not fully adhere to it as did other British colonies.

In 1833, the United Kingdom abolished slavery, and South Africa modified its legal system to conform to the rest of the empire. But, as was the case with Jim Crow laws in America after the Civil War, the prohibitions against slavery were so lenient that they were essentially regarded as names only.

Black indigenous and other People of Color were denied the same rights as White people even though slavery was prohibited; instead, they were virtually forced to work as indentured slaves for white companies.

After World War II, poor Black Africans began to migrate from the country's rural areas toward the metropolis in search of better employment due to growing industrialization and a greater need for labour in the nation's major cities.

White Afrikaans did not take well to this development, fearing that a more densely populated area would result in job losses for Whites and maybe an exodus due to a rise of Black Africans with higher social status.

Thus, the National Party put up a plan to safeguard white people in the 1948 election, which they called "Apartheid"—Afrikaans meaning "the state of being kept apart."

South Africa was divided into four groups under the National Party: White, Black, Colored, and Indian.

White and Black are obvious choices. People who were any combination of non-white and white were referred to as coloured, while immigrants from India who had ties to the British Empire were referred to as Indian.

There were thirteen racial federations or sub-groups based on language groups under the four quadrants. The other three groups were pushed farther away, isolating them and keeping them from pursuing higher-paying jobs, while the White quadrant was allowed to remain in the cities.

Interracial unions were forbidden as of 1949. Every South African citizen over the age of 18 was assigned to a racial group under the Population Registration Act of 1950, and under the Group Areas Act of the same year, residents were forced to relocate to a township or neighbourhood that was recognized as being within their racial quadrant. To maintain the homogeneity of each community, this decimated the formerly multiracial communities found in South Africa's population centres and even divided mixed-race families. The Immorality Act, passed in 1950 as well, makes it illegal for people to engage in sexual activity with someone who is not of their race.

Because of all these regulations, a profoundly oppressive society emerged in which the white minority dominated almost every aspect of the daily lives of people from the other three racial quadrants. People of colour and Black people lost their ability to vote. Indians were denied the right to vote as well, but they had never been granted it in the first place. All public spaces were segregated based on race, with black people not being permitted to remain in metropolitan areas for longer than 72 hours without permission.

Strict censorship rules were also implemented by the government, which suppressed resistance to Apartheid and censored any media that could raise doubts about the supposed "racial harmony." Massive arrests and expulsions were imposed on dissenting organizations, including the South African Congress of Trade Unions, the African National Congress, and the South African Indian Congress.

156 group leaders were accused of treason in 1956 after the Freedom Charter, a declaration created by an alliance of organizations advocating for racial equality, was made public. The length of time these rules were in place and how thoroughly dystopian South Africa was under Apartheid make it easy to understand how cruel a form of torture like necklacing may have eventually developed.

But contrary to popular belief, this was not an execution carried out with official state approval. In actuality, freedom fighters employed necklacing as a weapon in the cause. These groups needed to be able to assemble in complete secrecy because of how swiftly the government repressed anti-apartheid groups. Therefore, if any member of the community proved to be a traitor who supported apartheid, they had to be exposed in a way that was so painful and horrifying that it would deter others from reporting their neighbours to the police. South African liberation fighters had used immolation for years prior to necklacing.

They might threaten to "give you a Kentucky," or fry you till crispy, if you revealed confidential information if they thought you were spying on an anti-government group in your town.

This didn't develop into what we now refer to as necklacing until the 1980s. The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission stated that Maki Skosana, a single mother from the Duduza township, was the first victim of torture in South Africa. Skosana was thought to have sided with Third squad, a government task squad that was allegedly responsible for the deaths of four teenage protestors. 500 people assaulted Skosana during the activists' funeral, stripping her naked, beating her until she lost consciousness, and pinning her to the ground with a heavy boulder to prevent her from fleeing. She was pushed inside a tire, soaked in gasoline, and had broken glass mangled all over her body before being lit on fire. As if it weren't horrific enough, a crew had been there to shoot the funeral, so all of this was documented on live television. State media in South Africa used graphic photos of Skosana's burned corpse as pro-segregation, anti-resistance propaganda.

While necklacing was undoubtedly a powerful message, it was viewed as extremely contentious in the larger anti-apartheid activist movement.