Staff Reporter | The case of Zanele, professor Jonathan Moyo’s deceased daughter has opened a can of worms amid revelations of another development where a Zim corpse was found without any private parts, all allegedly removed by South African pathologists.
Sources say mortuary attendants and South African pathologists are regularly removing body parts and selling them for Satanic rituals particularly in India and Nigeria.
Following reports that the corpse of Zanele which arrived in the country with the heart missing, a Plumtree family has revealed a bizarre story where they also received their loved one’s body from South Africa with the genitals missing.
Themba (real name concealed) revealed to ZimEye.com how in June this year his family received the body of their brother who had died in South Africa with several body parts missing.
The body is said to have arrived for burial with the private parts missing, all the pubic hair roughly shaven off and six toes missing.
According to Themba, their brother died at a hospital South of Johannesburg after a short illness declared to have been of food poisoning. A postmortem was carried out by doctors at the hospital before it was collected by a prominent undertaker two days after the postmortem was done.
The man says that members of the family in Johannesburg never obtained a chance to view the full body after the postmortem until it arrived in Zimbabwe.
A neighbouring well known traditional healer was asked to perform a ritual on the body before burial, who later demanded close family members to have a private view before burial as “he suspected something fishy.”
“In our culture we don’t bury anyone who dies under suspicious conditions without doing the ritual which empowers the deceased to fight back those who may have killed him and block them from attacking remaining members of the family,” he explained.
“We asked the traditional healer to do the ritual for us where on he insisted on us viewing the body before burial as he suspected further foul play, that’s when we discovered the missing parts.”
The family is said to have been strongly disturbed by the incident so much that some members were refusing to go ahead with the burial. The stand off went on until the healer managed to calm the family claiming that “he was going to sort out the perpetrators” of the act. According to Themba the family agreed to keep the incident as a family secret while waiting for the traditional healer to go through his processes.
 
“We agreed not to disturb the funeral proceedings and not to raise eyebrows from the mourners and went on with the burial as the body had already stayed too long without burial and was beginning to decompose besides the embalming that had been done way back in Johannesburg.”
The traditional healer is said to have demanded to be given the pair of trousers that the deceased was dressed in for him to use for his process. According to Themba, who confesses to Christianity, five months later they still haven’t seen any results from the traditional healer’s promised which was “return fire”.
 
Huge business selling body parts

A Zimbabwean man working for a South African based funeral parlour made a strange revelation to ZimEye.com when asked in a confidential interview that trade in human parts of deceased people is huge business in South Africa.
According to the man, traditional healers mostly from West Africa have a huge demand for human parts which are used for making get rich quickly charms or for casting revenge on other people.
“I am not surprised by the things you are asking, this is very big business here in South Africa. Some parts can fetch as high as R100 000 depending on the social status of the deceased person where the part is removed,” he said.
According to the undertaker who claims to have been in the job of attending to dead bodies for close to 15 years, the sale of the body parts normally includes some members of the families who are called to the side and given irresistible offers and they agree to the deal.
“In some cases especially where family members keep a close monitoring of the body like wanting to wash, dress and load the body themselves, huge offers for outside body parts like private parts and eyes are made and they normally fall for the offers.”
“Parts that are closed inside the body like the heart are normally just removed without consultation and the body simply stitched back. Sometimes they come to the undertakers already missing from the hospitals and it’s called a missed call,” he added.
Asked what the family is considering doing now that there is a revelation of confirmed other cases of body parts going missing, Themba refused to commit himself to the issue claiming that his Christian beliefs divorced him from the whole matter and the family elders will decide what to do.
“The elders will decide, I am not party to it and not concerned as my brother was buried and done with,” he said.
Professor Moyo’s family has in the meantime engaged services of private investigators to investigate both the sudden death of Zanele and the missing heart. According to the undertaker interviewed, the Moyo family will be very lucky to get any meaningful leads on the matter as bodies pass through too many hands before they are buried and will not be easy to link a certain stage to the missing part.
In most cases bodies being transported from South Africa to Zimbabwe are loaded into the coffins privately by undertakers and the coffins sealed off and family members ordered not to open the transparent seal.