A growing backstreet funeral industry in Joburg is operating brazenly under the noses of authorities seemingly unaware of who controls what.
For R2 000, any one of several touts, who call the Hillbrow mortuary their "office", will sell you a coffin and dodgy documents and prepare your dearly departed for a trip to a neighbouring country - flouting most health guidelines in the process.
And queries to local, provincial and national government have confirmed a distinct lack of adequate laws and enforcement.
Bodies that "leak" out of coffins with no zinc liners, and hazardous embalming carried out by untrained workers, are some of the problems, say reputable undertakers.
Department of health statistics show that 2 333 bodies were repatriated in 2006, 1 678 going to Zimbabwe. A large number of those were prepared by unregistered undertakers, according to the National Funeral Directors' Association of Southern Africa (NFDA).
The association has issued a plea to the government for proper controls, lashing out at politicians for ignoring this request for several years.
The mixed messages from authorities on the industry extend to the Competition Commission, which, the department of trade and industry (DTI) says, is supposedly investigating exploitative pricing and practices in the funeral business.
But Thulani Kunene, head of enforcements and exemptions at the commission, says there is no investigation as they have never received a formal complaint.
The Funeral Federation of SA (FFSA) also sent a regulation proposal to the DTI in 2004, to no avail.
Nash Govender, head of the NFDA - one of SA's four associations of undertakers - says bodies destined for the border needed, among other things, certificates from doctors or health authorities that the corpse was "non-infectious" and properly embalmed.
The problem is that there is no verification of these health standards by the government.
Mortuary touts have a wide network of contacts which allow them to get the required documents in about two days - including embalming certificates seen by The Star, printed crudely on home computers.
"Anyone can print an embalming certificate, and border officials don't know the difference," Govender said.
Embalming is a method of preserving a corpse and involves draining the body of fluid and replacing it with a mixture of formalin, methanol, glycerin and water intravenously.
However, in backstreet embalming, bodies are not drained but merely injected in a single spot with formaldehyde.
This was confirmed by touts who work from the Hillbrow and Germiston mortuaries and from some public hospitals. Some who spoke to The Star work out of a grubby private mortuary in Westbury.
Govender said this inferior method of embalming could lead to rapid decomposition, especially when the body was being driven in high heat across border posts to other provinces or being flown in Africa, "where there are never refrigeration facilities".
And because fly-by-night undertakers often don't use zinc liners, the likelihood of people contracting diseases like hepatitis B from decomposing bodies increases.
"Putrification can set in and the corpse can turn from solid body into liquid. It will then attract flies and maggots," Govender said.
National department of health spokesperson Charity Bhengu said laws stipulated that corpses destined for other countries must be embalmed and sealed in a zinc liner and placed in a "strong coffin".
Bodies of those who died from Aids, cholera, typhoid or any haemorrhagic fever, rabies, meningococcaemia and polio may not be transported "by train or in any other way" unless the body had been "screened off" under the directions of a doctor and there is a letter from the doctor confirming it did not constitute a danger to health.
However, Hillbrow undertakers said zinc liners were optional for repatriations.
There seems to be little accurate record of, or control over, funeral businesses. Johannesburg City Parks keeps a list of organisations, but spokesperson Oscar Oliphant said they "cannot vouch that the information is accurate".
Johannesburg City Parks was in charge of burial space, and the city's environmental health department was responsible for the regulation of funeral directors.
Gauteng health department spokesperson Zanele Mngadi said undertakers were regulated by the national department.
But a spokesperson for the City of Johannesburg, Nthatise Modingoane, stated that funeral parlours were a local government competency in terms of the constitution, which was "silent on funeral undertakers".
"We are not aware of illegal funeral undertakers' businesses in Hillbrow and will appreciate it if any could be reported," he added.
Theo Rix, of Doves funeral parlour and a past chairperson of FFSA, said his company was losing money because of the illegal undertakers.
"Our biggest problem is the non-regulation of the industry," he said.