Secrets from the veld bodies
place in which we are not asked it,” she says.
Additionally, people may not admit to being from another country for fear of being discriminated against.
Complicating the matter further, there is also more to race than biological distance. How a person identifies is not necessarily the same as their physical race. Someone’s bones may show that they have strong African heritage, for example, but they identify as coloured.
Both Steyn and L’Abbé are quick to point out that this form of identification — known as presumptive identification — has its limits. “It doesn’t provide [a definitive] identification, but we’re narrowing down the possible number of people X can be, so rather than being 5000 people, it might be 500 people,” L’Abbé says.
More research could help to narrow down this number but no one is throwing money at forensic science.
“Nobody is interested in the dead,” says Steyn. “Who will be interested to sponsor any research or a project or a lab that is helping to identify the unidentified?
“It’s not something commercial that’s going to bring in any money or that you can advertise as good work that you have done.”
But, even if it was available, all the data in the world would not in itself fix a system with fundamental problems.
The Hillbrow medico-legal facility in Johannesburg, with its annual intake of about 3 000 bodies, records its cases by hand in a large ledger. Often the writing is illegible and there’s no validation of what the person on duty writes.
Crucial information, such as the police officer’s station phone number and the crime administration system number — the unique number identifying the case — are habitually left blank.
Aside from these obvious possibilities for human error, there are more subtle opportunities for mistakes. An official may say that the man who died is black, of medium build, between the ages of 30 and 35. But there is no agreed definition of what medium build is, what a 30-year-old looks like and even the definition of black. “It’s your perception. It’s not objective; it’s subjective,” says Candice Hansmeyer, a special forensic pathologist at the Hillbrow facility.
On the other side is the family searching for a missing person — families who are also prone to human error.
“We have got family members who last saw their loved one years ago and now they have got to try remember, ‘he’s about so tall’, ‘this is what he looks like, she looks like’,” Hansmeyer says. “Hairstyles have changed, skin colours change depending on nutrition, sun exposure.”
That said, a more scientific approach would improve identification, as would a computerised system. It might also provide an idea of the scale of the problem. If you want to know how many unidentified bodies moved through the Hillbrow facility’s yellow walls, you have to check manually.
“They must get all the dockets, they must compare all the dates. It’s tedious, it’s laborious,” says Mothobi Mokheti, who is in charge of information communication technology for the forensic pathology service.
This team of one is developing and piloting a mortuary management system for the South Gauteng forensic pathology service, which includes eight facilities.
The pilot scheme involves working with forensic officers and managers in the Hillbrow laboratory to capture bodies’ data and develop the system to address forensic officials’ needs.
“The second phase is to put the missing persons section on the system,” he says.
Currently, mortuaries — even ones in the same administrative cluster — do not share easily accessible databases. The police have their own database, but that can only be used by members of the service.
“We absolutely need a database and we need to have someone who works on it with a whole lot of dedication,” says Steyn, who has worked in South African forensics for more than two decades.
“If we could put all the data together for all the morgues, and all the case studies we do [at universities], and at least have that available and try and match the missing persons against that list, I think it would be a great contribution. Just by doing a few basic things right, we’ll be able to identify quite a few people … [But] all of these case reports that we write, they are of no use unless there is someone to follow it up.”
For the very difficult cases, such as decomposed veld bodies, academics and officials are pinning their hopes on advances in science. In the past few decades, there have been remarkable improvements in identification standards, software and tools, and they hope this will continue.
“I hope that, in 10 years’ time, how we are looking at ancestry will look like old technology,” L’Abbé says. “I hope the next generation of researchers will take it so much further than we are able to do, and that in time we will improve identification.
“Until then, I will store [the bones of my unclaimed and unidentified cases] in the cupboard. Until someone comes for them.”
Someone’s bones may show that they have strong African heritage, for example, but they identify as coloured