How home affairs rendered me stateless and non-existent through a software malfunction

“You can’t have an ID card.”

When a Home Affairs official tells you that you can’t have the thing they’ve been saying you have to get from them, it’s, what? Kafkaesque, Alice in Wonderlandish, or just an everyday S&M tangle with red tape?

It’s fickle, for starters. I’ll get to the conspiracy bit later.

My wife had decided that a dinky little ID card would be more convenient than the green book, so to get a “twofer” for the price of one trip we went together. I was due for an update anyway. The face that officials check to verify that I am me is only just coming into adulthood and so can’t be said to be proof of ID. Besides, my ID book is tatty and has lost its cover, so I was looking forward to being able to proffer something less embarrassing on demand.

Now, if my wife were telling this story, it would be about the whizz-bang efficiency of Home Affairs. Proof that a single moment does not define all and everything in the way Comments Sectioners like to serve up reality.

Twenty minutes. That’s how long it took for her to go from queue to Exit with a receipt in hand. Great, I thought. I was next in line, and I was already telling friends in my head that the two of us had been in and out in less than an hour.

I slid my green book across the counter to the official, my buoyant smile breezily reciprocated. Isn’t life great? Till it isn’t.

“What do you mean I can’t?” I asked once my mind had sifted through the wreckage of my optimism.

To her credit (I think), she stuttered with embarrassment. 

“I’m not allowed to use the word,” she said, grasping for whatever she had been told to call the likes of me. After a minute of squirming she came out with it: “You’re a foreigner.”

This was news to me. 

“But here’s my ID,” I said. “And I have a South African passport,” I said. “See, I’m a citizen,” I said, “and you have been telling citizens to come and get their card IDs on pain of virtual death.”

Foreigner