After 36 years of being “stateless”, Primrose Moyo Modisane collected her South African birth certificate at the department of home affairs office in Germiston, Ekurhuleni, on Tuesday.
"This means she can get her identity document, unlocking access to essential rights and services, including health care, education for her children, social assistance and financial inclusion, to which she has always been entitled as a citizen," her legal team said.
In April the Pretoria high court ruled Modisane was a citizen by descent through her grandmother Barbara Modisane, a South African born in the 1940s in the then-Transvaal.
The court ordered home affairs to recognise her citizenship, register her birth and issue her with a birth certificate and identity document within 30 days.
According to a statement by Modisane and her co-campaigners, more than four months later and despite extensive documentation, DNA tests, school records, sworn affidavits and even the support of parliament’s portfolio committee on home affairs, she remained undocumented.
A press conference was scheduled for Tuesday morning to highlight her struggle.
I will go to my mother’s grave and tell her that this suffering is finally over
— Primrose Moyo Modisane on her fight to obtain SA citizenship
On Monday afternoon, the department of home affairs notified Modisane that her birth certificate was ready for collection.
Modisane discovered her lack of documentation when the department visited her school in Ekurhuleni during her matric year. She was born in Zimbabwe when her mother moved there. However, she was never registered for a birth certificate. Her mother, who was also undocumented, relocated from there to SA when she was a child. They lived with her grandmother in Vosloorus.
Her struggle to become legal was aided by Lawyers for Human Rights. She did DNA tests with her grandmother and mother to prove they were related.
Her mother, Phumulani Tshuma, received her documentation weeks before dying of untreated cancer in 2023. This was after years of being denied hospital access because of her undocumented status.
Primrose’s two daughters were also denied birth registrations until the court intervened. Their father is South African.
Judge Johann Kriegler, a retired Constitutional Court justice and human rights lawyer, said the matter should never have taken so long to resolve.
“It should not take a court order and the threat of a media briefing for a South African citizen to be acknowledged in her own country,” he said.
“While we celebrate the development, we must also reflect on the many other individuals who remain stateless and unheard, and recommit to ensuring no-one else is forced to fight this hard for something that should be automatic and just.”
Modisane said the first thing she would do when she receives her ID is to “open my own bank account, get my name added to my children’s birth certificates and register my youngest child for school [her eldest was enrolled with the help of her employer].
"Then I will go to my mother’s grave and tell her the suffering is finally over.”
WATCH: Primrose Moyo Modisane's experience was shared with MPs serving on the home affairs committee in 2021, as part of a presentation by Lawyers for Human Rights on the challenges of "statelessness", its causes and consequences:
TimesLIVE
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