For the poorest people in Victorian society, struggling to provide for food and housing, the best hope of paying for funeral arrangements was to join a burial society. But, as Jonny Wilkes investigates, this supposedly charitable insurance system was open to abuses and grotesque exploitation
After being told she had given birth to a stillborn baby girl, a 29-year-old Sebokeng woman was shocked to discover just hours before the funeral the hospital had given her a body of a baby boy to bury.
The government yesterday submitted a report to the High Court, saying that a total of 34,56,757 street children were given birth certificates without their parents’ birth registration information from July 22 to November 21 this year, as there is no legal bar to issue certificates to the children.