Woman misses her funeral

By: OSWALD SHIVUTE at ONASHITENDO

A YOUNG woman estimated to be in her mid-30s missed her funeral last week and the corpse of a 78-year-old granny went missing in Windhoek following a case of mistaken identity.

The family of the unnamed woman were performing the last rites before her final rest on Wednesday at Ongha (Ohangwena region), 40km north of Ondangwa, when they discovered that they had the wrong body in the coffin. The funeral was abandoned immediately.
Meanwhile, the family of granny Frieda Tshekupe Iita from Onashitendo village 120km west of Ondangwa in Omusati region, were frantically looking for her remains after she died in the Katutura hospital in Windhoek on June 17.
After a couple of days searching, they traced the family members of the young woman, who confirmed that the grandmother’s corpse was taken by mistake and carried on a 750km bus-ride to Ongha.
Iita’s family are now looking for answers about how the story of the woman who missed her own funeral and the missing body of their elder came to be.
Iita’s body was expected in Onashitendo on Wednesday, but instead ended up in Ondangwa, having travelled an extra 40km the wrong direction for days.
The daughter of late Iita, Fredericka Lugambo Nanyemba, who is a resident of Windhoek, told The Namibian that their mother was taken to the Katutura State Hospital earlier this month.
They arranged for a funeral undertaker to transport her body back to Onashitendo last Wednesday for the burial at the weekend.
When they went to the mortuary on Wednesday morning, they were stunned to find that her body was missing.
Both the hospital and the mortuary personnel started an investigation and the mortuary personnel remembered that a certain family from Ongha in Ohangwena region had removed a body on Monday, June 18 or Tuesday, June 19.
On Wednesday, they located the Ongha family, who had also just discovered the stunning case of mistaken identity because their loved one was a younger woman. They took the elder’s body to Ondangwa mortuary.
The Ongha family reportedly went back to Windhoek to collect the body of their young relative.
“It was really a mess, created by the Katutura mortuary personnel who just gave out a body or bodies, without proper identification and also from the Ongha people, who, probably took our mother’s body wrongly, also with out proper identification,” Nanyemba said.
The 78-year-old Iita was finally laid to rest at Onashitendo cemetery on Saturday amid murmurs of the bizarre story of her last trips. The Namibian could not confirm whether the young woman has been buried.

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