How onerous paperwork, high costs burden bereaved families

Not long ago, the media were awash with reports of a family in KwaDukuza, KwaZulu-Natal, that brought the body of their dead relative into a localCapitec branchafter a policy payout was declined. The family was protesting the bureaucratising of death and burial in SA, where dignity is dependent on economic resources. The public’s reaction mostly focused on the family’s actions, seeing it as disruptive and showing no respect for the dead.

Far less attention was paid to the structural violence beneath a system that attaches dignity to documentation and withholds it when paperwork fails. Little reporting was done on the implications of the onerous paperwork, policies, affordability, and profit margins that appear to regulate death and burial in SA. Funeralsare framed as tests of respectability and compliance.

In her research, Bulelwa Maphela, a scholar at the University of Johannesburg, reminds us of the importance of understanding burials as an ethical practice. Maphela demonstrates how in SA dignity is redistributed through regulation, paperwork, and institutional discretion. When a burial is reduced to compliance, dignity becomes conditional on access, approval, and affordability.

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For families already navigating high unemployment and precarious incomes, these limitations often force impossible choices. A system that strips people of dignity in death when they can’t provide the necessary paperwork or pay the ever-increasing costs of funerals should not be tolerated in any society. The story of the death of Jesus is another example of how, thousands of years ago, the followers of Jesus were faced with similar systemic injustice relating to the dead body of their loved one.

As millions of South Africans celebrate Christ’s death and resurrection over the Easter weekend, we have been struck by the way in which the small community around Jesus that cared for his dead body challenged the Roman Empire. In the Roman world denying burial was part of the punishment of crucifixion. Jesus was spared the indignity of not being buried or being thrown into a pauper’s grave through the mediation of a few people who remained close to him even in his death.

Joseph of Arimathea asked Pilate if he, Mary and the few who had remained at the cross could take the body of Jesus and bury it. Joseph was not a relative but a respected elder and disciple of Jesus. He offered his own tomb while other members of the community provided the linen and spices and began preparing the body for burial.

These were all acts of public refusal to conform to the state/empire and how it assigned worth to bodies. The burial work of the community became a communal ethic of care – a resistance against a system that intended for the body to be discarded as worthless.

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