The "necklace" - placing a gasoline-soaked tire around a victim's neck and setting it on fire - has re-emerged in South Africa's black townships as a favored way to eliminate political opponents.
A kangaroo court murdered three 17-year-old blacks by the necklace method in Kwamashu township near the port of Durban last week. A fourth escaped and is in the hospital.The cryptic police report said a "people's court" had carried out the murders but did not detail the alleged "crimes."
The victims had probably run afoul of equally youthful activists, who tend to kill political rivals in this way, as well as black policemen and town council members, seen as collaborators with apartheid.
In the sprawling black city of Soweto, near Johannesburg, police have found the charred bodies of two men and a woman in the past week, and one Sunday afternoon earlier this month, an unidentified boy estimated to be 15 was necklaced for reasons unknown.
One of his hands had been chopped off before the tire was lit - a common way of ensuring the victim does not try to remove it.
The same day a white man was attacked by robbers, who doused him with gasoline and dragged him toward a burning tire. They then saw a Bible lying on the seat of his car, spared him and fled in the car.
Toward the end of May, activists in Sebokeng township, 40 miles south of Johannesburg, captured a much-hated policeman. Skuta Marumo was necklaced, then his upper torso was severed from the rest of his body and displayed on the roof of a house.
Lloyd Vogelmann, a researcher into violence who teaches at the University of the Witwatersrand, said, "Necklacing is symbolic. To communicate the social message effectively, you want to make your killing as brutal as possible so that it gets noticed.
"Also, it is an attempt to communicate - particularly a message of intimidation: This is what will happen to you if . . ."
Burning means the complete obliteration of the victim and reflects the intense anger of the killers, Vogelmann says.
He highlights the ritual aspect of the practice, which involves several people: One ties the hands, or cuts them off; another places the tire over the victim's head and yet another strikes the match.
"It's a kind of bonding for the executioners."
The grisly ritual is thought to have begun in KwaNobuhle township near Port Elizabeth, in March 1985 when a black town councillor and his three sons, the youngest of them 11 years old, were stabbed and necklaced.
Initially the black liberation movement, the African National Congress, avoided condemning the practice outright, and Winnie Mandela, wife of then-imprisoned ANC leader Nelson Mandela, once endorsed it.
"With our boxes of matches and our necklaces, we shall liberate this country," she told a cheering crowd in Pretoria's Mamelodi township in 1986.
The ANC has since repudiated the statement and the practice.
That repudiation may have had some effect, and at times it seemed the method had died out, but in the overheated political climate as South Africa stumbles toward democracy, the necklace is back.
Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service