State security and township rebels treated bodies as ritual sacrifice

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. (Township rebels towards the bitter end of apartheid’s duration responded in kind to the provoking call by publicly “necklacing” police informers, sacrificing the complicit of the community to the struggle in the township streets by lighting a car tire around their necks and burning them to death.) 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. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1562

Categorization

• XREF: Extends the sacrificial-framework lens from the reader’s published essay on ritual sacrifice — apartheid torture and necklacing as corpse-dealing ritual. — connects to: Apartheid security forces tortured and destroyed black bodies as ritual sacrifice; Anthropologists hold that destruction of the victim defines sacrifice — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s…, 734
• ADDENDUM: Directly supports ‘On Sacrifice’ by providing a modern, ideological (non-Homeric) case of state and counter-state corpse sacrifice.

Broader Connections

• Apartheid security forces tortured and destroyed black bodies as ritual sacrifice #responds-to (0.85)
• Anthropologists hold that destruction of the victim defines sacrifice #exemplifies (0.72) — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, 734