Why hearses sport sirens and lights in Guinea

A SIREN wails out across the jammed streets of Conakry, the capital of Guinea. As horns toot, vehicles part for a car sporting a spinning blue light. It is not the police or an ambulance. Instead a hearse comes wailing through. Politicians and the emergency services are not the only ones to use lights and sirens in Conakry. Congestion is so bad that the dead use them, too.

Funerals generally have to take place quickly. Most people in Guinea are Muslims and their faith prohibits the embalming of the dead. It also stipulates that people should be buried as soon as possible after they have died, and generally within 24 hours. Another reason for quick burials is economic. Keeping the remains of a loved one chilled in a mortuary costs about $5.50 a day, or more than twice the average daily wage in one of the world’s poorest countries, says Aboubacar Diallo of Gamal Abdel Nasser University in Conakry. Yet getting to the cemetery can prove difficult because the capital is set along a narrow peninsula…