South African ID Numbers: The racial identifier flag

Published on 30 March 2012 • Estimated reading time: 2 minutes

Introduction

In a previous post on what makes up an ID number I mentioned that

The second last number used to be a racial identifier but now means nothing.

But I never went into the topic, so let’s dive into the options—today it is for almost everyone 08 (I suspect a 09 or two may be floating around) but in the "bad old days", there was a variety of options:

For my non-South African readers, the use of Coloured as a group here is not the same as the American racial slur—in South Africa, we have a population group called Coloured.

How did we change from the old to the new?

So what happened to those bits as we no longer have them? In 1986, a new law was introduced: Identification Act No. 72, which repealed the law that made classification (and a horrible concept where every Black person had to carry a "Pass Book") illegal.

So over the course of 1986 and 1987, everyone in South Africa was issued a new ID number, and somewhere inside the government, there is a database that maps old ID numbers to new ones for people born before 1986! I can’t remember what the process was like, since I was about four years old at the time. This means I have a different number on my birth certificate from what I use now!