“Negro and White Unite”

Nicholas Rush Smith’s chapter explores collective violence in postapartheid South Africa, where vigilante violence involving an attempt to necklace alleged criminals has been common. That the necklace--placing a gasoline filled tire around the neck of a victim and setting it alight--is frequently deployed is surprising, Smith asserts, because the struggle against apartheid was, in important ways, a struggle for a procedural rights-based legal system, something necklacing undermines. Moreover, necklacing was originally developed as a tool to sanction political threats under apartheid, whereas today it is primarily used as a technique to punish criminals. Why, Smith asks, is necklacing still practiced twenty years after the dawn of democracy given that it was first implemented as part of the struggle against apartheid? Smith’s chapter argues that citizens deploying the necklace challenge the postapartheid state’s-rights-based legal system, which South Africans often argue enables insecurity and immorality, to proliferate; rhetorically and ideologically, this in some ways parallels the criticisms that American lynchers often made of procedural, due process rights. Through its spectacular violence, the necklace dramatizes these critiques of the democratic legal order much like it dramatized critiques of the apartheid state.