Apartheid police treated tortured black bodies as sacrifice to destroy evidence and memory

Evidence

Security forces in the service of the apartheid state notoriously sacrificed black men in just these ways, as Allen Feldman has argued in a series of articles, treating them as meat, softening them up by way of torturous interrogations, seasoning with sweated beatings over braaivleis (barbecuing) fires in farflung fields just out of social sight. … The police-tortured bodies were burnt to a crisp, often hacked to pieces, so as to destroy the evidence, devoured almost literally in all but body. The sacrifice was oiled with considerable inebriation, as much to obliterate the memory as to loosen any inhibition, to disqualify any qualms as symbolically to imbibe the blood of the Savior. To cleanse the spirit of the burden of memory, to save the soul by deleting conscience. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1562

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Directly extends ‘On Sacrifice: The Real Kind, with Corpses’ — apartheid state torture-as-sacrifice, where ritual violence against the body serves to absorb and delete the memory/conscience of the sacrificers, mirroring the purgative logic examined there.
• XREF: Connects to Allen Feldman’s work on state violence and the body as a sacrificial surface; also resonates with the necklacing counter-practice described nearby.