How a landmark ruling reshapes the meaning of surnames

IN A landmark ruling that champions equality, the Constitutional Court declared that men may legally adopt their wives’ surnames. This decision, which strikes down archaic and discriminatory provisions of the Births and Deaths Registration Act, is rightly celebrated as a victory for human dignity and a blow to patriarchal norms.

But to fully appreciate the profundity of this judgment, we must look beyond the question of gender and ask a more fundamental one: what is a surname, really?

The answer is both complex and straightforward: a surname is a human construct, a recent invention in the grand sweep of history, and one of the most potent tools of statecraft ever devised. It has remarkably little to do with biology and everything to do with bureaucracy, control and the often-violent imposition of power.

Therefore, the court’s ruling is not just about changing a name but is about reclaiming agency within a system of power that began with the rise of the modern state and was brutally perfected through colonialism and apartheid.

This article contends that the ConCourt ruling addresses the exercise of state power, not a transformation of ‘our’ culture, because a surname is a product of administrative control rather than biology or heritage.

The imposition of surnames in South Africa was historically a tool of colonial and apartheid governance, used to monitor, classify and control populations. Therefore, the ConCourt judgment merely reaffirms state power while enabling the state to re-adapt one of its most significant administrative creations.

Before the 17th century and the consolidation of the Westphalian model of the sovereign state, most people in Europe were known by a single name, perhaps accompanied by a descriptor like “John the Smith” or “Mary of the Hill”. As states grew in power, they needed a mechanism to tax, conscript, and govern their populations. The solution was the mandatory, hereditary surname.

As James C Scott argues in Seeing Like a State, pre-modern states were essentially ‘blind’ as they knew precious little about their subjects, their wealth or their land. Thus, the central project of the modernising state was to make society legible, to simplify complex social realities into administrative categories. The hereditary, fixed surname was a masterstroke in this project.

The surname’s adoption was accelerated by key historical events, such as the Council of Trent (1545-1563), which mandated that Catholic parishes maintain rigorous baptismal registers, compelling the standard recording of family names. This created a continent-wide system of registration, working hand-in-glove with secular authorities.

This was not an organic cultural evolution but a deliberate administrative imposition. As Michel Foucault, the progenitor of biopolitical theory, would contend, this marked a shift from the power of the sovereign to take life to a new power to foster life, that is, to manage populations as a biological resource.

The surname became the primary identifier in this vast biopolitical database, essential for tracking birth rates, health, migration and wealth for taxation and conscription purposes.

The Peace of Westphalia in 1648, which cemented the modern concept of the sovereign nation-state, accelerated this trend. The Westphalian state, with its defined borders and centralised authority, required a way to manage its internal population.

Surnames provided the perfect administrative tool for this, effectively turning abstract individuals (population) into quantifiable subjects of the state. Due to large quantities of data, surnames are no longer as necessary for public administration: they have been replaced with identity numbers.

While modern public administration increasingly relies on identity numbers, fingerprints and digital records, the surname retains its symbolic and social significance. It continues to signal state-engineered lineage, community and belonging, carrying weight beyond bureaucratic necessity.

Even as its practical role in governance diminishes, the surname remains a potent marker of personal and collective identity within the confines of state authority and violence, bridging historical legacies of control with contemporary struggles for recognition and dignity.

This European invention did not remain within its own borders. It became one of colonialism’s most insidious exports. Empires needed to govern vast, unfamiliar territories, and their solution was to impose the bureaucratic logics of the metropole onto colonised societies. Surnames became a key tool in this administrative violence. In the Americas, enslaved Africans were stripped of their original identities and given surnames reflecting ownership, geography or arbitrary designations.

But to understand its specific impact in South Africa, we must look beyond generalities to the brutal particulars of its application.

As underscored in the research of Stembele Johnson, “surnames are not of African origin; they came from the West, but because of colonialism, surnames were enforced on African people”. This enforcement was not merely administrative, but an act of profound violence, dating back to the earliest colonial encounters.

The system of inboekelinge illustrates this point. As documented by historians like Susan Newton-King, inboekelinge were indigenous Khoi and San children forcibly placed in settler households after raids or under dubious “apprenticeship” contracts. This was a system of bonded labour, a thinly veiled form of slavery.

Khoi and San children’s names were erased and replaced by Dutch or Afrikaans surnames, often those of their masters, to overwrite lineage and incorporate them into settler identity. Robert Shell’s Children of Bondage documents how slaves at the Cape of Good Hope were renamed upon arrival: Christian first names enforced conversion, while surnames such as “van Bengale” or “van Mosambique” reduced human beings to geographic markers of displacement.

Others were given the surnames of their masters, or calendar names like “September” or “October”, which continue to characterise the surnames of Coloured communities today.

When the Voortrekkers moved northwards, they took along the inboekelinge system to the Highveld with them. This system involved the capture or coercion of African children, from communities raided during frontier conflicts, who were then placed in Boer households as bonded labourers.

Stripped of their indigenous names and traditions, these children were assimilated into settler culture, learning Dutch or Afrikaans, adopting European surnames, and performing labour essential to the expansion and consolidation of the Voortrekker frontier. These ex-slaves were later integrated into the native population with assigned surnames.

In both the Highveld and the Cape, the act of “booking in” children basically stripped them of kinship and traditional identity, incorporating them into a settler framework. Achille Mbembe describes this as “necropolitics”: the power to decide who may live, die, or be remembered. Colonisers erased belonging through names, which were not merely symbolic. Pamela Scully notes that freed slaves were compelled to retain these imposed surnames, embedding erasure in property law and passing it to descendants.

Colonial authorities quickly realised the power of naming for governance. As Mahmood Mamdani has argued in Citizen and Subject, the colonial state ruled by defining and fixing identities. In South Africa, this was achieved through registries of births, baptisms, marriages and deaths. Entry into these systems demanded European-style names.

Missionaries were crucial actors. Individuals like Elizabeth Elbourne and Clifton Crais show how mission baptism required adopting Christian names, which were then inscribed in church registers that doubled as state records. Indigenous systems of clan naming (iziduko) and praise poetry were excluded from this archive. The law recognised only what it recorded. Thus, whole systems of African identity were rendered invisible.

Under British colonial rule, pass laws and taxes made fixed surnames mandatory, formalised by the 1927 Native Administration Act, with chiefs responsible for providing names for official records. Names became central to surveillance, producing racial categories through bureaucratic inscription. Apartheid perfected this system: the Population Registration Act (1950) and Group Areas Act used surnames to signal race, while missionary spelling errors became binding, leaving many, as Stembele Johnson finds, unable to explain the meaning of their own names.

This history brings us to the sophisticated core of the South African state and its Constitutional Court. The state’s legitimacy, like all modern states, hinges on registration. Through Section 8(2) of the Constitution, it recognises two types of legal persons: the homo sapiens registered at the Department of Home Affairs and the persona ficta (the juristic person, like a company) registered at the Department of Trade and Industry and Competition.

This distinction echoes the ancient legal concept of the King’s Two Bodies explored by historian Ernst Kantorowicz: the natural body of the citizen and the eternal body politic of the state both exist only through inscription into the ledger.

The state interacts with its human population through the administrative identity created at birth registration. The surname is the linchpin of this legal identity. The old Births and Deaths Registration Act, by making it disproportionately difficult for men to change this linchpin, enforced a specific, gendered biopolitical order.

It presumed a fixed, patriarchal lineage as the default setting of the state’s database, a direct legacy of the colonial and apartheid past. Women were considered junior in this relationship, but this had nothing to do with culture. This means they were always expected to take a man’s surname.

The Constitutional Court’s ruling is therefore a critical intervention. It is not a mere policy change but a fundamental recalibration of state power. It declares that the state’s administrative tool — forged in the fires of Westphalian statecraft and hardened in the crucible of colonialism — cannot be used to enforce outdated social norms. It challenges the very logic of the ledger, insisting it must serve dignity and equality, not just bureaucratic convenience.

It acknowledges, as Johnson’s research finds, that most surnames are “said to be names of forefathers (ancestors), and there is a small amount or none that links to femininity in these surnames”. The court’s decision begins to rectify this gendered imbalance, offering a path to disrupt the patrilineal strictures that surnames have historically enforced. By intervening at the point of registration, the judgment ensures this power is applied equally, using the law to assist the state’s administrative machinery.

Critics may decry this as a threat to tradition. But as this history reveals, the mandatory surname itself was a state-driven rupture with earlier, more fluid traditions. Johnson observes that “if you can take the census from 1880 to 1945, you will find most of those surnames don’t exist today. It means we make them as we go”. The observation that people today change names freely online and that surnames constantly evolve, with new clans (iziduko) emerging, is not a sign of social decay but proof of the very artificiality and malleability of the construct.

The Constitutional Court has done more than advance gender equality; it has shown that tools of state control can be reclaimed for personal autonomy. The court strengthens justice without weakening the state by allowing individuals to choose their surnames.

Names, whether reflecting African traditions or marital equality, now reside under personal control, transforming a once-oppressive bureaucratic tool into a testament of dignity and self-determination.

Siyayibanga le economy!

* Siyabonga Hadebe is an independent commentator based in Geneva on socio-economic, political and global matters.

** The views expressed here do not reflect those of the Sunday Independent, Independent Media, or IOL.

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