Call me by her name

Two men are suing the South African state in a bid to force its bureaucracy into closer alignment with its values.

Kiri Rupiah in Johannesburg

A new bride puts a ring on her new husband's finger as they get married in the small church on Robben Island, where Nelson Mandela was imprisoned, on 14 February 2020, just offshore from the city of Cape Town. (Photo by Rodger Bosch/AFP)

When a woman marries a man in South Africa, she automatically gets her husband’s surname – unless she requests otherwise. A man cannot take his wife’s surname – not even to add it to his own for a new surname that hyphenates both.

That’s unconstitutional, argued the lawyers representing two men from the city of Bloemfontein who tried to take on their spouses’ names, only to be refused by home affairs officials.

One wanted to take his wife’s surname, the other tried to register a double-barrelled surname combining his and hers. Home affairs refused to do so, citing the Births and Deaths Registration Act of 1992 which specifies name-change procedures only for married and divorced women.

The Bloemfontein high court previously ruled for the men, saying the law discriminated against them on the basis of gender and was unconstitutional. But the court order will only take effect if it is confirmed by the Constitutional Court, which heard the case on Tuesday.

Speaking to The Continent, Professor Pierre de Vos of the University of Cape Town said the court will almost certainly confirm that the act, a product of patriarchal attitudes that position men as household heads, is discriminatory.

The Constitutional Court might order that the provisions of the birth and registration act that are now being applied only to women immediately also apply to men too. But it could also require Parliament to produce its own amendment which would have to treat men and women equally.

Meanwhile, in the United States, married women may come to regret taking their husbands’ names at all. A new bill, proposed by a Republican lawmaker, aims to require extra documentation from voters to prove their citizenship: passports, birth certificate, or naturalisation papers.

The Pew Research Centre estimates that as many as 69-million women voters who adopted their husbands’ names would find it harder to prove their identity as their documents might not bear the same names.