We chose a mid-month weekend, a Friday, Saturday and Sunday — and tried to get a sense of how many died, where, and how.
South Africa is one of the most violent societies in the world — and the murder victims are often faceless, unidentified bodies, buried in unmarked graves.
In one ordinary weekend in the middle of last month, 132 people died in violent crime.
Province by province, the Mail & Guardian tried to put faces and names to the victims, many of whom still lie in the state mortuaries.
We wanted to break with the tradition of simply numbering the victims, as if they had no identity, no families, no personalities. We wanted to know how they died and where they died.
It proved to be an impossible task. Some 80 people every month are never identified. And even when they are, police are not always helpful. The KwaZulu-Natal police refused to give us any names of the 60 who died in their region.
Ricardo Dunn followed the trail of blood through South Africa’s state mortuaries
IT was an ordinary weekend, beginning on Friday night, February 16. But by midnight on Sunday February 18, 132 people would be dead – — victims of South Africa’s crime epidemic.
Of the six slain in Soweto during that weekend, only one has been identified. Inspector John Shiburi, based in Soweto, said that in many cases of unidentified murder victims, they had been living a hostels – — their families were far away, unaware that their husband, son, lover or father had been killed.
Thousands of South Africans each year will never discover why members of their family who left home in search of work never returned home. Most of the victims are men.
The statistics that tally up the faceless victims of violence are even worse in KwaZulu-Natal.
There are 40 unidentified murder victims lying in various government mortuaries in the province. And, extraordinarily, where the names are known, the office of the commissioner in KwaZulu- Natal will not release them — in case this information jeopardises investigations.
If after three weeks nobody claims these bodies, the victims are given a pauper’s burial in a plain wooden coffin without any religious ceremony.
On average, South Africa buries a staggering 80 unidentified murder victims every month — and that figure is increasing. KwaZulu-Natal police department Superintendent Bala Naidoo says some KwaZulu- Natal newspapers are reluctant to publish information about unidentified murder victims, which narrows the chance of these bodies being claimed by family members.
Naidoo said that some black newpapers like Ilanga and The Post Natal regularly assist the police in locating family members of unidentified victims.
The case of Mroqoza Molebatse, a hostel dweller in Soweto, is typical of the rigmarole involved in identifying a body. Molebatse died after he was severely assaulted. He was not carrying any form of identification when he was murdered.
Police somehow found out that he had been living in one of the hostels, and traced some people he had known and eventually established his name. But nobody at the hostel knew where Molebatse came from or where his family could be contacted.
Two weeks after he was murdered, police have still not discovered a motive, and no arrests have been made. Molebatse’s corpse is still lying in the mortuary, waiting to be claimed.
Yet he is luckier than fellow victims in the big fridge — at least his name will be engraved on the wooden cross above his grave when he is buried next week.
Naidoo said although there were many cases when victims were not identified, the police “pull out all the stops when trying to identify the victim”. In some cases, families report the victim as a missing person, and in such an instance the police contact the family when a murder victim fits the description of the missing person.
“Unfortunately, if the person has not been reported missing, we cannot allow hundreds of people to view the victim, so we ask relatives to at least describe the person before they are allowed to look at the body,” Naidoo said.
Failing a physical identification, fingerprinting is the most common and effective method of identifying murder victims who are found without any ID.
Forensic athropology is another useful technique used by police. In a recent case, it was imposssible for the police to identify a young man who had been badly beaten. The post mortem, however, showed the victim had surgery on one of his legs. Medical records from nearby hospitals showed that a man fitting the description of the victim had had leg surgery a few years earlier.A positive identification was subsequently made on this basis.
As well as checking a victim’s medical history, police also check the victim’s teeth for any recognisable medical work conducted in the past. This technique is,however, often useless, as many unidentified murder victims have either never been to a dentist or there are no dental records available.