By Wendell Roelf
KHAYELITSHA, South Africa, July 12(Reuters) – Beaten and set
alight, Ncedile Gigi’s unrecognisable remains have not been
buried since March, when a mob fed up with poor policing took
the law into their own hands, torching the 26-year-old in a
crime-ridden South African township.
Accused of theft, Gigi was one of three men who had
petrol-laced tyres shoved over their shoulders in Khayelitsha, a
shanty town 40 km (25 miles) east of Cape Town.
The heat fused his body with that of another and the charred
remains were then left on a sandy patch of ground where children
normally play soccer – a macabre warning to others and a grim
reminder of the social problems that plague Africa’s biggest and
most developed economy.
For South Africans, the violence also evokes the dark days
of apartheid when suspected collaborators of the white-minority
regime were executed by “necklace” – a car tyre wedged over the
torso, followed by a can of petrol, and then a match.
Police removed the bodies a few hours after the attack but,
five months later, have yet to release two of them for burial
because they do not know which is which.
“The way my brother died is very painful. We are waiting for
DNA tests,” Gigi’s older sister, Kholiswa, told Reuters in her
home, a tin and wood shack. “Maybe if I was there I could try to
stop them – maybe just a beating only and not go so far as to
burn him.”
The death of Gigi and 10 other young men in the township
since January reflects an alarming loss of trust in the police
in South Africa’s slums, where rates of robbery, rape and murder
are among the highest in the world.
“This is actually a deeply worrying trend for the police and
government because citizens do not have faith in formal
institutions and are resorting to violence,” said Hennie van
Vuuren, director of the Cape Town office for the Institute for
Security Studies.
Continued…
