http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Necklacing
The practice appears to have begun in the Cape area of South Africa in the mid-1980s, and to have arisen from the practice of burning the bodies of anti-apartheid activists killed by the police, or suspected collaborators killed by anti-apartheid activists. One incident sometimes cited as the first recorded instance of necklacing took place in Uitenhage on 23 March 1985 when a group of people killed Benjamin Kinikini, a local councillor who was accused of having links to a vigilante group. Kinikini and members of his family were dragged out of their house, stabbed to death, and their bodies set on fire. Two of those judged to be the perpetrators, Wellington Mielies, 26, and Moses Jantjies, 23, were hanged on 1 September 1987. But in this case the victims were killed by stabbing, and not by burning tyres.
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By the end of 1985, however, it seems that in many instances a burning tyre alone was used to kill, and soon afterwards the perpetrators began to taunt the victims by saying "We're going to give you a pretty necklace."
Necklacing "sentences" were sometimes handed down against alleged criminals by "people's courts" established in black townships as a means of enforcing their own judicial system. Necklacing was also used by the black community to punish its members who were perceived as collaborators with the apartheid government. These included black policemen, town councilors and others, as well as their relatives and associates. The practice was often carried out in the name of the ANC, although the ANC executive body condemned it. In 1986 Winnie Mandela, then-wife of the imprisoned Nelson Mandela, stated "With our boxes of matches and our necklaces we shall liberate this country" which was widely seen as an implicit endorsement of necklacing, which at the time caused the ANC to distance itself from her, although she later took on a number of official positions within the party. The number of deaths per month in South Africa related to political unrest as a whole from 1992 through 1995 ranged from 54 to 605 and averaged 244. These figures are inclusive of massacres as well as deaths not attributed to necklacing.
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Necklacing returned to South Africa in 2008 when black South Africans turned against black immigrants from the rest of Africa. The influx of immigrants led to violence, looting, and murder in some of South Africa’s poorest areas; this violence included necklace lynching. This raised concerns that the latent practice might return once more as a form of public protest in the wake of service delivery failures by the ruling ANC.
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It tears a good person apart to see how cruel humans are to each other.
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