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South Africa's one million invisible children without birth certificates
- NDizzle 1y ago[flagged]
- throwaway48476 1y agoHaiti failed to develop, south africa is developing in reverse.
- MSFT_Edging 1y agoHaiti was in debt to france over freeing themselves from slavery, with a debt structure designed to never be paid off.
- throwaway48476 1y agoHaiti and the DR only diverged economically after the debt ended. It's not a convincing argument.
- MSFT_Edging 1y agoThe debt kneecapped the potential for development. It's not a difficult concept. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/05/20/world/americas/enslaved-haiti-debt-timeline.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/05/20/world/america...
- throwaway48476 1y agohttps://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/59/GDP_per_capita_development_in_Haiti_and_Dominican_Republic.svg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/59/GDP_per_... Temporal causality is not a difficult concept.
- MSFT_Edging 1y agoSure is interesting how they begin to diverge around the time the US-backed Paul Magloire coup'd the sitting president and prioritized tourism via cruise ships over education.
- JuniperMesos 1y agoYeah, if you're trying to explain the difference in outcomes between Haiti and the Dominican Republic today, appealing to poltical events in Haiti in the 1950s when that economic divergence began to happen has a lot more explanatory power than appealing to poltical events in Haiti in the early 19th century (including the two decades or so when Haiti itself had colonized the DR). My own understanding of 20th century Haitian poltics is fairly limited. I don't know if "prioritized tourism via cruise ships over education" is a fair characterization of Magliore's policies in Haiti, or, assuming it is, that this constitutes a good casual explanation of the Haiti/DR economic divergence. I'm frankly skeptical - lots of places that are not Haiti have tourism as a major, government-supported component of the economy, and nonetheless are capable of providing some kind of useful formal education to their populace and have better economic outcomes than Haiti. I suspect the story in Haiti is a lot more complicated than this. But sure, if there's a specific education policy that the DR did implement in the 1950s and that Haiti under Magliore did not, that explains DR's greater economic development today, feel free to make the case.
- MSFT_Edging 1y agoI'm generally a fan of Cuba so take whatever I say with that in mind, but to me the big difference was Cuba was able to make a cleanish break from the big neighbor to the north while Haiti always had a US hand reaching in, possibly to avoid Cuba II. While Cuba is pretty poor(and we can talk about embargo in those respects), they generally met their revolutionary goals. They got the mobsters out of Havana, who previously had massive sway in the government alongside the American ambassador. They massively improved literacy, put tons of effort into health for their citizens(prior to the revolution, a majority of cuban children suffered from foot parasites among other things), and did a relatively forgiving land reform to remove the big land-owners from power(ie Land reform in Japan post WWII by the US was considerably harsher policy wise iirc). As far as a country with a huge trade embargo against it, they've done pretty well and built up allies around the world. If Haiti followed a similar path, we'd see just as many complaints over their governance, but from a totally different angle. As for DR, I think its still debatable. From the 30s to the early 60s, DR was under a dictatorship that was fairly brutal. After that, a democratically elected president was couped with US support, then essentially a man described as a puppet for the previous dictator was put into power for another 12 years. Perhaps the relative stability + having a ruler with US approval is enough to explain the relative success. I think any time a country is kicked in the shins for being a little too democratic, there's going to be a period of rebuilding. That period gets longer each time they get kicked in the shins, with the more intelligent folks leaving each time, until they're left with the people you don't want leading a country. A self fulfilling prophecy of sorts.
- ashanoko 1y ago[flagged]
- MSFT_Edging 1y agoThis conversation is silly. The lovely Haiti watchers who ignore historical contexts and the effects of a couple centuries of foreign involvement in their sovereignty has no effect in regards to modern material circumstances. The only things that matter, according to those who love to shit on Haiti, is their apparent inability to self govern. This inability must have come from nowhere, or is genetically innate to the people. It's crazy how every country who has had it's sovereign legs kicked out from under them multiple times just ends up being a failed state. Total mystery!
- ashanoko 1y ago[flagged]
- JuniperMesos 1y ago> It's crazy how every country who has had it's sovereign legs kicked out from under them multiple times just ends up being a failed state. Total mystery! It's not the case that every country that has had its sovereign legs kicked out from under them multiple times just ends up being a failed state, and this is an important observation if you're trying to come up with a theory for why Haiti is in the state it is in. As the sibling comment mentions, a number of countries that today are peaceful and prosperous places to live, the sorts of places Haitians might want to immigrate to rather than live in Haiti, are countries that earlier in history were badly defeated in war and conquered - this descibes the losing WWII powers such as Germany, Japan, and Italy, it describes countries subject to some kind of colonial influence until well into the 20th century like Vietnam, South Korea, China, India, and many other places. Most of these countries are doing fairly well today, certainly much better than Haiti, which hasn't been directly ruled by a colonial power since the beginning of the 19th century. Germany in particular was badly defeated and occupied twice in the first half of the 20th century and had crippling debt obligations imposed on it by (largely) France, and is nonetheless a much much better place to live today than Haiti is. This is a fact about the world that needs to be explained.
- newyankee 1y agoI mean you scratch a lot of commentators on colonialism anywhere in the West and deep enough you will find an apologist. While there might be structural issues in Haiti, a colonial apologist starts with simplified one sided history -> The colonizers civilized the country -> the people deserved it -> The better side won, survival of the fittest What I have seen is that unlike the Star Trek post scarcity world visions, all discussions are stuck at some sort of national or ethnic identities at one end or a very simplified oppressed vs oppressor ideology at the other end which prevents discussing many ideologies based on their teachings through a modern civilized lens. It does not look like the divisions would ever improve because we are now moving into a post labor world and the asymmetry is probably a feature that defines geopolitical clout and power and no one has the incentive to think bigger.
- JuniperMesos 1y agoStar Trek is a sci-fi franchise written mostly by American liberals with a specific vision of what society ought to look like hundreds of years in the future (and who are generally not interested in exploring in detail more material questions like, how precisely does the world become post-scarcity). Haiti is a bad place to be right now in real life. The colonialist apologist case with respect to Haiti is something like: rich white nations are already spending money and other resources providing humanitarian aid to Haiti, because the human need there is real and the native Haitian government is not capable of governing in a way that would fix these problems. If those same rich white nations were actually formally in charge of Haiti in a neo-colonialist poltical arrangement, they could govern it better and improve the lives of the average Haitian in a material sense. It's not directly related to the colonial history of Haiti, which is over 200 years in the past at this point. I personally think there are serious issues with this argument, but it's not completely crazy to suggest that the revealed preference of many Haitians is to live under the governance of rich white countries, especially in light of Haitian immigration to the US which was a major issue in the 2024 US presidential election.
- logicchains 1y agoWouldn't Zimbabwe be a closer example?
- NDizzle 1y agoSure. What do all of these events have in common?
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- pessimizer 1y agoWhite people reminiscing about the beauty of segregation and subjugation, and pretending to wonder why a dog raised in a tiny box with no room to move and no fresh air to breathe for its entire life doesn't win the Westminster dog show when you let it out. Instead, they want to be congratulated for eventually being forced to open the box.
- consumer451 1y ago> Sure. What do all of these events have in common? Could you please finish this thought? There are possible uncharitable readings that don't look so good.
- bombcar 1y agoFor reference, the US has procedures for this: https://www.usa.gov/citizenship-no-birth-certificate https://www.usa.gov/citizenship-no-birth-certificate because people without birth certificates are still somewhat common, even children. Vermont didn't require it until 1955!
- thatguy27 1y agoSo does South Africa. However, capable administrators are severely lacking.
- mothballed 1y ago[flagged]
- afavour 1y agoIf I was looking to cite evidence that South Africa has a racist past I'm not sure stadium chants would be my _first_ example...
- femiagbabiaka 1y agoOne of the main figures lionized in that song (which is an anti-colonialist chant to be clear) is a white guy, Joe Slovo. These people are unserious.
- mothballed 1y agoJoe Slovo isn't Boer; of course he has no problem with Kill the Boer as he allied himself with the ANC againts the Boer. Being white doesn't excuse you from tribalism/racism.
- femiagbabiaka 1y agoTribalism is not when you colonize a country and terrorize the former residents from centuries. Tribalism is when your multi-racial coalition pens a song expressing their rage at said terror. I understand now, priors updated.
- ryandv 1y ago[flagged]
- tomhow 1y agoWe've asked you only a few weeks ago to avoid posting flamebait to HN, and it's specifically against the guidelines for comments to introduce generic tangents. Please make an effort to observe the guidelines if you want to keep participating here. We have to ban accounts that break the guidelines repeatedly. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- stroebs 1y agoMy father (born in ZA) had to re-register his birth at 65 when emigrating to the UK on a visa. The ZA government had no record of his birth, despite him having a drivers license, passport, tax returns for 40+ years… This is the least bit surprising coming from a country that is in steady decline.
- bloak 1y agoDo you know why the British authorities wanted a birth certificate? Did his ZA passport show date and place of birth? Did the ZA birth certificate have some other information that the British authorities specifically wanted, like the names of the parents? Or were the authorities just following some standard procedure with no obvious purpose?
- CaptainOfCoit 1y agoFWIW, I moved to a European country about 20 years ago. The first 10 years I thought everything was fine, but once I was applying for something, they said that it seemed like I never actually properly entered the system, but had just began. Most public services worked alright regardless. Cue some confusion for a while, and some filled forms later, and I finally got legally approved and finalized to actually stay, ten years after I initially arrived. Bureaucracy can be crazy at times, and sometimes it seems like data just gets lost, for whatever reason.
- pjc50 1y ago> they said that it seemed like I never actually properly entered the system, but had just began Can be quite a risk for people who entered a long time ago. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windrush_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windrush_scandal > Bureaucracy can be crazy at times, and sometimes it seems like data just gets lost, for whatever reason. The easiest way of reconciling data with reality if the rules don't allow changing the data is to change reality. By deporting people.
- toenail 1y agoAnd western KYC/AML laws that are forced upon all countries exclude those people from having bank accounts.
- tiku 1y agoThis is why crypto has so much potential, to give them access to a form of digital money.
- cdmckay 1y agoCrypto doesn't solve any of the actual problems here. These kids can't access any services because they don't legally exist in government systems. No birth certificate means no school enrollment, no healthcare, no social grants. You think a 15-year-old footballer who can't play in tournaments because he has no birth certificate is going to be helped by Bitcoin? What school is letting them enroll because they have a hardware wallet? This is a civil administration problem that needs government solutions: streamlined processes, digital systems, reduced fees, and political will.
- toenail 1y agoSo the government creates a problem, and you think more government is the solution? Bizarre. Yet the 15 year old can find a teacher and pay them directly, they can buy and sell services globally and get paid. Yeah, bitcoin doesn't solve any problems..
- shagmin 1y agoCan't you just say that about any less than perfect solution? Bitcoin has been used to facilitate illegal drug trafficking, which is a problem. Yet you think more bitcoin is the solution? Bizarre. So there's already a lack of a stable, functioning government, and the solution you're touting isn't currently a reality, why? In the US when there's little friction in a marketplace people in some communities resort to using Tide laundry detergent as a medium of exchange. There's nothing stopping them from using bitcoin or cryptocurrencies currently, but navigating a market place, finding qualified teachers, finding motivation to use what little resources you have to use a novel medium to pay for teachers in a place with no opportunity, etc., doesn't seem too easy. One tool alone doesn't usually solve any problems.
- shrubble 1y agoThis is seen in many countries, that the bureaucracy is set up to serve its own needs. They will run normal office hours, yet the people working subsistence jobs are not able to take a day off to handle paperwork when each day they only earn enough to pay for their food and shelter.
- hdb385 1y ago[dead]
- hangonhn 1y agoChina didn't issue birth certificates until 1996. Because I was born there before 1996, I do not have a birth certificate. In addition, I was also birthed at home instead of a hospital. That said, it's never been a hindrance. My parents managed to obtain Hong Kong permanent residency for all of us and I guess that sort of rooted my birthday and birth place and it's been a continuous line of documentation since then -- green card and finally US passport. I think this was helped by the fact HK probably dealt with this issue a lot during the latter half of the 20th century.
- dmoy 1y agoYea not birth certificates from the hospital, but there is documentation. Well, there was for awhile. My grandpa definitely didn't have a birth certificate back in the 1930s (or 1920s? lol) in Taishan, but also no docs of any sort whatsoever.. But my MIL from Mao era has docs from the local officials that's all notarized, as does my wife. The dates might be... you know, not exactly right, but they're close, and importantly they're accepted by both the Chinese government and also other foreign governments for official purposes (immigration, etc). I think I the article here we're talking about something fundamentally different from the last 70-ish in China. They're talking about people with like no official docs whatsoever, can't get healthcare, national ID card, anything. Very different from China 70 years ago, and very different from even pre civil war China.
- alephnerd 1y ago> I think I the article here we're talking about something fundamentally different from the last 70-ish in China 黑孩子 and 黑户 were fairly common until the last 5-6 years. The issues mentioned in the article were prominent in rural China and the lower tier of migrant workers before e-governance innovations along with a relaxing on the one-child policy started a decade ago. Furthermore, the township mentioned in the article is itself one of those migrant areas in Cape Town, similar to what urban villages are in Beijing and other cities in China.
- em-bee 1y agoyou may not have had a birth certificate, but for sure you must have had a hukou, which establishes your birthday and who your parents are. that's pretty much all that is needed in most cases.
- Lammy 1y agoOne should be able to exist without being in The System's database. In previous eras this need for The System to minimize existential threats to itself by knowing about every single human that might be able to challenge it (especially en masse) was accomplished by baptism. Making birth certificates indispensable to the individual is just the modern secularized version of that.
- mothballed 1y agoThe Church had some parallels to the state in the olden days, in that it was the primary system of social support and welfare. Identification and segregation is an important element of any welfare system, to prevent the system being destroyed by an unlimited amount of persons drawing aid while only a relatively fixed small pool provide the aid. The state in the more liberal countries did not usually introduce such measures to make it difficult to live there without ID until the state had pretty much fully taken over the prior job of the church (or family) to provide to the unemployed, sick elderly, etc. On a smaller scale, imagine back in certain periods of the old days, when families were the main method of social security. If you could not identify who was your own brother or mother, you would constantly being scammed (or even not scammed, just overwhelmed) until you were broke or the system broke. I don't have any answer how to roll back the nationalistic identification and Orwellian immigration systems without decoupling social benefits from citizenship/residency, or from becoming so incredibly wealthy you just don't care.
- yardie 1y agoWhile listening to Trevor Noah's podcast one of the topics they were discussing was South Africa. Apparently, the apartheid South African government never included Black South Africans in the census. That was how little regard they had for native South Africans they couldn't even be bothered to count how many fellow humans existed in their country. The new government was required to carry out a census in order to know how many MPs were going to be in parliament. And they were blown away by the count. Until then, it was just a guess. So South Africans not having birth certificates or any birth records is the least surprising.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- inshard 1y agoNative South African is a debatable word. You could argue that the Khoisan are the natives. But I doubt these are the affected populations that are the subject of this article. There were multiple migrations into South Africa, some from the south by the Europeans and some from the north by the Bantu. All around a 200-year primary window. Even today, the northern migration routes are still active.
- yardie 1y ago> Native South African is a debatable word. They've been there over 2000 years, I think we can consider them native at this point. European colonialists and apartheid justifiers try to shoehorn the Bantu migration as being just slightly before Europeans arrived when fossil records prove it was thousands of years prior. Have you looked at a map? What would stop the oldest humans, who have been there hundred thousand years, from moving from the central African plans to anywhere in Sub-Saharan Africa?
- andsoitis 1y ago>> Native South African is a debatable word. > They've been there over 2000 years, I think we can consider them native at this point. > European colonialists and apartheid justifiers try to shoehorn the Bantu migration as being just slightly before Europeans arrived when fossil records prove it was thousands of years prior. > What would stop the oldest humans, who have been there hundred thousand years, from moving from the central African plans to anywhere in Sub-Saharan Africa? The Khoisan have been in South Africa for 20,000 - 30,000 years. While the Bantu-speaking groups brought advancements like agriculture, ironworking, and permanence settlements, they also displaced the original Khoisan peoples, pushing them from fertlie lands or hunting grounds. Raids or conflicts over cattle and territory also happened. Assimilation and intermarriage also occured, causing many Khoisan to lose their distinct langage and culture over time.
- tibbydudeza 1y agoI always wondered why the hospitals or clinics where they give birth does not register it ?. It is an ordeal to go the local DHA offices to do anything - the system is offline :).
- hulitu 1y ago> South Africa's one million invisible children without birth certificates This really looks like a propaganda piece. Is there an _analysis_ why they don't have a birth certificate ? AFAIK the apartheid regime was in power until the 90's.