Aclandestine visit to Durban’s Gale Street mortuary, the largest in Natal/kwaZulu, has exposed nightmare working conditions and claims of serious irregularities. These include:
- Unclaimed and decomposing corpses, some of which have been at the mortuary for a month or longer.
- A shortage of cold-room space and cutting rooms for autopsies.
- Allegations that district surgeons have written post-mortem reports without carrying out examinations, and that undertakers are touting for business.
- Complaints of racism and victimisation by black staff.
The sight greeting the Mail & Guardian reporter who was smuggled into the Gale Street mortuary was gruesome: between 40 and 50 corpses lay in a cold room built to accommodate 24 bodies. Lying strewn on the floor, some corpses had been there for a month or more.
Speaking on condition of anonymity, staffers blamed the logjam on the absence of mortuaries in townships and the failure of police to track down
families of the dead. They argued that in terms of police procedure, investigating officers had to obtain fingerprints within seven days and to try to track down families within 14 days, failingwhich the dead had to be given a pauper’s funeral.
Police spokesman Major Bala Naidoo said police preferred to give families more time to identify bodies. He denied overloading at Gale Street, saying there were mortuaries throughout the province and that a new one had been built in Phoenix, south of Durban. But staffers said that on most occasions, except with politically motivated deaths, police made no effort to track down families.
Investigating officers broke standing orders by relying on black policemen and staffers at the mortuary to take fingerprints. “These are then sent to Pretoria, and it takes six weeks or more before we receive replies on identification. Many decent people are given paupers’ burials because relatives have not been traced” said one staffer. The workers also complained about the shortage of cutting rooms.
“The cutting rooms look like dirty abattoirs. Bodies are shoved around on the floor and there’s blood everywhere,” said one worker. The sources also said that police had recently caught three district surgeons who had written out postmortem reports without conducting examinations. The bodies had been brought to the Gale Street mortuary, where “in one instance we found that the report showed a man had sustained gunshot wounds. Apart from it being illegal, the failure to conduct proper post-mortems could mean families lose insurance clatms”.
Professor Jan Botha, a state pathologist who conducted post-mortems at Gale Street. declined to comment as “the matter is sub judice”. Insiders said another snag at Gale Street was that staffers were forced to tout for undertakers. They claimed a husband and wife team — the man was a warrant officer at the mortuary police station and the woman an undertaker — expected them to tout for them on pain of “victimisation”.
The source added that a black policeman had been accused of selling state fridges to another funeral parlour. Naidoo said while the possibility of touting “cannot be ruled out”, there had been no substantial proof of the allegations.
New path for pathology
An independent medico-legal unit, the first of its kind in Africa, is lobbying the government for changes in forensic pathology. Formed earlier this year with a grant from the Danish government, the Durban-based unit also offers the services of independent forensic or medical assessments in cases of political or state violence, in an attempt to prevent pathologists covering up for police.
Unit co-ordinator Wendy Watson said services were offered to families across the country. The unit was lobbying government “to form late a protocol which will stimulate discussion on changes in the system of state pathology “. For example, the hurtling of politically motivated deaths should shift from the Department of Safety and Security to the Department of Justice.
“If a person dies in a cell, you cannot expect police to investigate themselves,” said Watson. The unit believes post-mortems should be conducted at a provincial level, rather than in the police laboratories. This would result in more efficiency and accuracy”.