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Nigerian journalist and novelist Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani wrote about the disturbing reality behind some of the “unclaimed bodies” being sent to the country’s medical schools.
BBC
Medical student Enya Egbe runs away from anatomy class in tears after being shocked to see the corpse he is about to dissect.
This was not an unpleasant response from a naive young man.
The 26-year-old still vividly remembers that Thursday afternoon seven years ago at Nigeria’s Calabar University, he gathered with his fellow students around three tables with corpses placed on each.
A few minutes later, he screamed and ran.
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The body his group was going to dissect was the corpse of a Divine, whom he had befriended for the past seven years.
“We used to go clubbing together, “he told me.
“There are two bullet holes in his right chest.”
Oyifo Ana is one of the students who chases after Egbe and finds him sobbing outside the classroom.
“Most of the bodies that we used at school had bullets in their bodies. I felt very sad when I realized that some of them may not be real criminals,” said Ana.
He added that one morning he saw a police car full of bloodied bodies at their medical school, which has a morgue.
AFP Last year, Nigerians staged large demonstrations against police brutality.
Egbe then sent a message to Divine’s family, who apparently had been searching for his relatives from one police station to another, after receiving information that Divine and two of his friends were arrested by security officers on their way home from traveling at night.
The Divine family finally managed to claim his remains.
What Egbe is dealing with underscores two things: the lack of bodies available to medical students in Nigeria and what happens to victims of police violence.
From the 16th century to the 19th century, British law provided for the bodies of executed criminals to be sent to medical schools – a punishment that also served to advance science.
In Nigeria, the law currently submits “unclaimed bodies” in government morgues to medical schools.
Getty Images Nigeria was hit by protests against police brutality last year
The state can also retrieve the bodies of executed criminals, although the last execution took place in 2007.
More than 90% of the bodies used in Nigerian medical schools are “criminals shot dead”, according to research published in the medical journal Clinical Anatomy in 2011.
In fact, this means they are suspects who were shot dead by the security forces.
Their estimated age is between 20 and 40 years, 95% of whom are male, and three out of four people come from a lower socioeconomic class.
“Nothing has changed 10 years later,” said Emeka Anyanwu, a professor of anatomy at the University of Nigeria, who co-authored the study.
‘Ambulance duty’
Last year, the Nigerian government set up judicial panels in various states to investigate allegations of police brutality.
This is in response to the #EndSars protests sparked by a viral video of a young man allegedly being shot dead by police’s Special Anti-Theft Force (SARS) in the southern state of Delta.
Many of those who testified before the panel spoke of relatives being arrested by security forces and never to be seen again.
In many cases, the police defended themselves by saying that those missing were armed robbers who died in the crossfire.
Meanwhile police spokesman Frank Mba told me he was not aware of any cases where police dumped bodies into anatomy laboratories or morgues.
AFP
In written testimony presented to a judicial panel in Enugu state, Cheta Nnamani, a 36-year-old trafficker, said he had helped security forces dispose of the bodies of people they had tortured or executed during four months in SARS detention in 2009.
He said that one night, he was asked to haul three bodies into a van, a task known in detention parlance as “ambulance duty”.
Police then locked him in an ambulance and headed to the nearby Nigerian University Teaching Hospital (UNTH), where Nnamani then unloaded the bodies. They were taken away by the morgue staff.
Nnamani told me that he was then threatened with a similar fate.
BBCNnamani said he was asked to transport three bodies into a van
In the southeastern Nigerian city of Owerri, the private morgue owned by Aladina Hospital has stopped accepting bodies from suspected criminals because police rarely identify or tell relatives that a family member has died.
This left the morgue burdened with the cost of maintaining unclaimed bodies for several years, until the government finally gave permission for mass burials.
“Sometimes, the police try to force us to accept bodies, but we insist that they take them to a government hospital,” said Ugonna Amamasi, the morgue administrator.
“Private morgues are not allowed to donate bodies to medical schools but government morgues can,” he added.
Relatives are left in the dark
A senior Nigerian lawyer, Fred Onuobia, said relatives were entitled to take the bodies of legally executed criminals.
“If nothing shows up after a certain period of time, the body will be sent to a teaching hospital,” said the advocate.
But the situation is worse with extrajudicial killings, as relatives never know about the deaths or can’t find the bodies, he said.
Only by chance, the family of Egbe’s friend Divine was able to give him a proper burial.
The Nigerian Association of Anatomists is now lobbying for a change in the law that will ensure mortuaries get complete historical records of corpses donated to schools, as well as family consent.
AFP
The law is also expected to establish a way to encourage people to donate their bodies to medical science.
“There will be a lot of education and a lot of advocacy so people can see that if I donate my body, it’s for the good of society,” said the association’s chairman, Olugbenga Ayannuga.
As for Egbe, who was so traumatized by the sight of his friend’s body that he abandoned his studies for weeks, imagining God standing by the door every time he tried to enter the anatomy room.
He ended up graduating a year later than his classmates, and now works in a hospital laboratory in the state of Delta.
The Divine Family managed to get some of the officers involved in his murder fired – a bit of justice but still more so than many other Nigerians whose loved ones have fallen victim to police violence and possibly ended up in medical school across the country.
(ita / ita)
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