Smart ID Card With Khoi-San Traditional Name

S. Africa’s Department of Home Affairs has issued its first electronic ID card carrying a Khoi-San traditional name that uses the click character ‘!’. The card was handed to Stellenbosch student !Khūboab Oedasoua Lawrence, after his family spent 18 years trying to obtain documents that reflected the correct spelling of his name.

The case exposed a long-standing limitation in legacy civil registration and ID systems, which treated click consonants and other diacritics as ‘special characters’ that could not be captured in core databases. As a result, many Khoi-San citizens received birth certificates and IDs with approximate or altered spellings, creating downstream problems for school enrolment, examinations, travel and other events where exact biographical matching is required.