Just Another Tuesday at the Morgue

Just in time for Xmas - here's a story about the day I visited a morgue in Accra. It's been cross-posted from the JHR correspondence site for your reading pleasure - or revulsion, depending on your stripe.


Seth is the first reporter at JOY that I've felt both a professional and personal connection with. He's leapt all over the country at various stations, and his journey has taken him from Takoradi to Kumasi and finally to Accra - the big smoke, as it were - and JOY FM. As a result he has worked with a number of JHR staff and always relishes the opportunity to meet someone new. He is quite literally a dream - hungry, tenacious and completely fearless.

We've already put together a story about domestic violence victims that received a strong response from both within the newsroom and from our listening audience. I've been racking my heat-fried brains to think of the next story we can work on. Today, I enter the newsroom, boasting my usual patina of sweat, only to hear: "Alison, today we're going to the morgue!"

I look at him quizzically, but I have to admit I'm secretly a bit excited. It's not that I'm a ghoul. Really, I'm not. I left all those neo-gothic predilections for gravestones and corpses behind in highschool, along with my pleather platform boots, sparkly lycra pants and Slipknot CDs. But I haven't even visited a Canadian morgue before. Something tells me the Ghanaian version is something else altogether.

Seth tells me the story. Basically, he heard a notification that the Accra Police Hospital is doing a mass burial sometime in the next month or so. He then heard some rumours that the police mortuary is frequently overpopulated by corpses and the sanitary conditions are allegedly becoming worse. So we're going to see for ourselves.

"I love weird stories like this," he says gleefully as we zip down Ring Road to Danquah Circle, where the hospital is situated. We enter the hospital grounds. As official sites in Accra go, it's a fairly usual one in its exterior, with an assortment of clearly labelled hand painted signs directing us to the registrar's offices.
As usual, I screw up and walk through a gate designated solely for car entry, and am curtly admonished by a security guard to double back and walk into the compound again, through the pedestrian entrance. Ah, Ghana! We walk up a few flights of stairs, passing a door marked "TYPING POOL" and then head into the registrar's office after a short wait.

He speaks freely with us and confirms that the mass burial will be happening because there's too many bodies in the mortuary. He explains that the police are in charge of picking up the unidentified bodies of those who die on the streets - an all too common occurence in Accra - and this is why the morgue is overloaded. "We give the announcements so people can come and see if they have a missing relative here, " he says. "But no one comes."

He adds that city cleaning is technically a duty that falls under the jurisdiction of the Accra Municipal Assembly. However, the burden of picking up "unknowns" is given to police because of the potential for a criminal cause of death.

As he speaks I think back to all the times when I answered the phone at JOY to hear a desperate voice begging that we do something about the body lying at Kaneshie, or Tema Station, or some overpass for two days or more.

Then I remember walking through Nkrumah Circle one afternoon with friends and smelling a terrible, sickly-sweet smell. As people on the street walked by holding their noses, doubled over with disgust, I asked a Ghanaian friend what the smell was. "That's corpse-rot," he said.

Seth asks the registrar some more questions. We ask for permission to visit the mortician. The registrar says no problem. I marvel at the power of access he's given us, particularly as some of my colleagues have had a lot more difficulty with certain officals. We make a stop first at the medical director, a kindly older fellow with an accent so thick I have to lean in close to hear what he's saying. He describes for us the process of mass burial - essentially the unidentified bodies are loaded, one atop the other, in a giant truck - "Like a refuse truck," he says. The truck drives to a predetermined gravesite where the bodies are dumped into a large hole. The hole is filled in. The end.

Baffled, I ask the director why such an undignified burial occurs when so many people here value the importance of funerals. The answer is money. People will actually not come to determine if a relative is alive or dead in the mortuary because of the sheer cost of burial. "It's not very nice," the director says. "What does it look like in this country, when we do things like this? Do you think this is really a developing country when this happens?" he asks me. I just shake my head. As often happens, I can't respond.

Now it's time for the true test of will - entering the morgue and meeting the mortician. The morgue is located at the back of the hospital, almost across the street from a residential street. We aren't hit with the smell until we reach the doors leading in. It's the same as the stench I smelled on the street near Nkrumah Circle. I clutch a hanky to my mouth, while Seth appears unfazed.

We walk through the front area of the morgue down a hall to the mercifully ventilated area of the mortician's office. He's wearing uniform dress and has an officious manner. But he's definitely a mortician - creepy and seemingly unconcerned about the burial issue. "You have to get rid of them somehow," he says. "So what do we do? Leave the bodies to rot on the street?" Seth unplugs his microphone in a dramatic sweep and asks if we can actually be given a short tour of the morgue. The mortician laughs. "If you can handle it," he booms, and we trot after him down the hallway.

I notice that Seth turns on his recorder secretly as we stride to the autopsy room. The autopsy room is as you would expect - walls painted with revolting green laquer and there's two empty steel tables, the glint of which is irrevocably linked in my mind with corpses, embalming fluid, and poorly-lit episodes of CSI. Then it's time to see the refrigerators.

I hold my breath as we glimpse into the first fridge - but it's empty! "This one is for the unknowns," the mortician says. He explains that they've moved the unknowns to another facitility as they have overcrowded the area that's roughly the size of my bedroom here. "How many people fit in there?" Seth asks. "Up to three hundred," the mortician says. I try to picture three hundred unknown corpses in various states of decomposition stacked on top of each other in this tiny room like pancakes and resist the urge to vomit a little in my mouth. Then the mortician opens the second fridge. 'For the knowns,' he says simply.

It's most decidedly not empty. Bodies are stacked on wooden bunk-bed type structures in the dim room - maybe 50, maybe 100. It's like summer camp, for dead Ghanaian people. Strips of white cloth are spread across most of the bodies' genital areas, but not all. Some bodies are emaciated and I can count every rib. Others look like they are sleeping like babies. All of them have a faint powdery white dust spread across the skin.

'Why not go in?' the mortician says, and nudges us both towards the door. I shriek and run back, while Seth grabs his arm. 'No sir, please,' he says woozily. The mortician laughs deep from his belly. I am thinking that this is starting to become seriously effed up. Just as I wonder whether he will simply shove Seth and I inside and lock us in with the dead people, we are ushered out of the morgue. ' Come back anytime!' the mortician yells.

We walk briskly down the walkway hand in hand, jabbering about what we just saw. I offer Seth some roasted plantain bought earlier. Both of us agree that eating will probably not be happening for the remainder of the day. The stench of human rot is still ripe in my nostrils. As of this writing, the AMA has denied that the mass burials are as undignified as the police officials described. The mass burial is due to take place at the beginning of the new year. Seth and I plan to go, perhaps on empty stomachs, and definitely with smelling salts and hankies firmly in hand.