The Roots of 'Necklacing': Why White Farmers in Zimbabwe Are Responsible for the Killings in South Africa

"The native is to be treated as a child and denied the franchise. We must adopt a system of despotism in our relations with the barbarians of Southern Africa ... I personally prefer land to niggers." -- Cecil Rhodes, Founder of "Rhodesia" (Zimbabwe) (1887)

"We do not accept that Britain has a special responsibility to meet the costs of land purchase in Zimbabwe. We are a new Government from diverse backgrounds without links to former colonial interests." -- Clare Short, UK Secretary of State for International Development (1997)

There was a sad little war in South Africa last week. Actually, it was one of the latest battles in a war that's been going on for over a hundred years. Like they say in the Congo, "Mokilo e komplike," "It's a complicated world.

Like a lot of wars, this one was between two groups that lost out in the bigger war. Now they're forced to fight each other for scraps, while the real bad guys, the British, send camera crews to go "tsk-tsk" at how uncivilized it all is. The way the BBC tells it, this wasn't even a war, just "riots" by Zulu mobs targeting Zimbabwean immigrants, but it was war. In most places and most times, war isn't uniformed armies meeting on the field of battle, but mobs looking for people from the enemy tribe to kill. When they find them, they kill them just like the Zulu mobs killed any Zimbabwean immigrant lucky enough to fall into their hands: in the goriest way possible, in order to scare the rest of the enemy tribe off the disputed turf.

It may not sound pretty, but then Gettysburg probably wasn't very pretty either, if you were screaming your head off after getting your leg blown off by a cannonball. The Great War wasn't very pretty if your eyes were melting down your face after you'd been gassed. The Eastern Front wasn't pretty, if you were a peasant woman wondering which army would be the one to rape, rob and kill you. You could go out on a limb and say that war in general isn't that pretty, if you're actually in it. So why do most people flinch at this kind of war, with mobs necklacing immigrants, more than they do at "conventional" war? One reason is that in this kind of war, the mob goes out of its way to invent new, horrible ways to kill people. Take necklacing, the favorite lynching method in South Africa for the last few decades. You tie up the victim, douse a car tire with gasoline, wrap it around his neck, and set it on fire. Pretty nasty stuff, but not "crazy" or "senseless."

The first thing to consider is how something as grim as necklacing got started. Necklacing evolved in the townships as a way of punishing police informers. You have to imagine the situation a little more vividly than most squeamish first-worlders are willing to do: the police and the army have a monopoly on weapons, so the guerrillas -- in this case, the ANC -- has to rely on its superiority in intelligence, information, secrecy. Ever since Michael Collins taught the Irish to stop trying to fight the British Army and focus on "putting out the eyes" of the occupier by killing his spies, guerrillas have been able to take down militarily superior forces. But this method requires that the guerrillas know everything about the occupiers, and the occupiers know nothing about the guerrillas. Anyone who informs for the police or army is a deadly enemy, and has to be killed in a way that will not only end the immediate threat but terrify anybody else who might be thinking of turning snitch into reconsidering.

And there are always potential snitches around. Again, use your imagination; this stuff isn't happening in Switzerland but in places where people are very poor and desperate. The police and army aren't squeamish about putting pressure on potential informants, and they control both rewards -- money -- and threats, like the power to arrest or "disappear" anybody they want. The pressure to inform is very strong.