Birth Registration Gaps Leaves Millions Of South Africans In Limbo

PUMLA RULASHE

MPHO Modise can only guess her age and it embarrasses her. “I would say I am about 33,” she says.

She is unsure because her birth in South Africa was never registered. Yet establishing her age is the least of her problems. Without a birth certificate, she risks becoming stateless because she cannot prove that she is a citizen.

Mpho believes she was around seven when she was abandoned with extended family in 1994 in Brits, a small farming town in the North West Province.

“One day mama went to work and never came home,” she said. “That was the last I ever saw her. She left nothing that identified who I am.”

The family that brought her up shared a surname with Mpho, but they could not get her a birth certificate. Mpho would watch forlornly as her new siblings went off to school every morning, while