The term is familiar by now, but the "necklace" is so benign a description that it barely hints at the horror of one of the world's most savage forms of execution. This is how it happens. In the townships of South Africa, militant black youths first capture a victim. Next they chop off his hands or tie them behind his back with barbed wire. Finally they place a gasoline-filled tire over the terrified victim's head and shoulders and set it ablaze. The melting rubber clings like tar to the victim's flesh, while flames and searing fumes enshroud him. Within minutes the execution is over. By the time the police arrive, the charred body is usually burned past recognition. Horrified family members, who may be forced to watch the killing, are often too intimidated to identify the murderers.
Such viciousness is a regular occurrence in South Africa today. Two people were killed by necklaces in Soweto, the sprawling black township outside Johannesburg, on New Year's Day. Steve Kgame, a well-known community leader in the Soweto-Witwatersrand area who has faced demands from radicals to quit his local government post, was in serious condition last week with gunshot wounds in the head and chest. Near Durban, two officials of Inkatha, a political organization made up mainly of members of the Zulu tribe, died earlier this month after fire bombs struck their homes. Outside Port Elizabeth, a vengeful mob last week murdered two youths in the Kwanobuhle township. Nearly 80 gold miners have been killed during the past ten weeks in tribal battles among black workers.
Since racial unrest broke out in South Africa in September 1984, more than 2,300 people have been killed. In the past six months nearly three-quarters of the victims have been blacks killed by other blacks. And for all its cruelty, the necklace is only one form of the violence that South Africa's blacks are inflicting on one another in segregated townships across the country. The bloodshed has made ungovernable many of the townships in which the country's 24 million blacks are forced to live and has given the government of State President P.W. Botha a potent propaganda weapon. Invariably referring to the slaughter as "black-on-black" violence, officials suggest that it proves blacks are too uncivilized to rule one another, much less the whites.
In fact, the reign of terror is in large part a grisly reflection of the apartheid system that gives power to South Africa's 5 million whites. Bottled up in teeming townships and denied any voice in the political life of their country, many blacks are filled with fury. The Rev. Nico Smith, a white Dutch Reformed minister who has moved into Mamelodi, a black township outside Pretoria, compares the situation to that of laboratory animals that begin to devour one another when conditions become unbearable. Says Smith: "Social pathology is consuming the townships. There is a loss of sensitivity for people's own lives and for the lives of others."