One of Zimbabwe’s busiest hospitals was having to give away unclaimed corpses in its mortuary to a medical school because the mortuary was overcrowded, a hospital spokesperson reported on Friday.
Harare Central hospital would hand over 42 bodies to the University of Zimbabwe medical school this month, said hospital superintendent Chris Tapfumaneyi.
Some were vagrants found dead in the streets, and some were victims of unsolved criminal violence cases. However, most were destitute people whose relatives could not afford a burial, said Tapfumaneyi. Many of the relatives abandoned the bodies, hoping they would be given a pauper’s burial.
Some of the bodies had been in the mortuary for three years. The first 40 bodies were given to the medical school last month after a request by its anatomy department.
The mortuary was built for 164 bodies, but it now held 600. ”We decided to donate the bodies owing to serious overcrowding which has affected our cooling system,” said Tapfumaneyi.
The number of bodies awaiting paupers’ burials was adding to the overcrowding at the mortuary, he said, because the companies contracted to carry out the burials were overwhelmed by demand.
Last month, the Harare municipality’s crematorium ran out of gas for its furnaces, with the result that private funeral parlours said they had accumulated the bodies of about 100 white Christians booked for cremation.
A small number had been taken to the city of Bulawayo, 400 kilometres to the south-west, by refrigerated truck for cremation at Bulawayo’s diesel-fired crematorium, funeral company executives said.
However, diesel was also in short supply, and it was uncertain how many more bodies could be cremated with the Bulawayo city council’s dwindling stocks of fuel.
Harare’s Hindu community also had a small diesel crematorium, and community leaders said they were considering lifting religious bars to the dead of other persuasions being cremated there.
Black Zimbabwean traditional taboos ban cremation. Suggestions that blacks should be cremated as a solution to overcrowded cemeteries have been greeted with outrage. – Sapa