South Africa's Top Court Makes Big Ruling on Surnames

South Africa's top court has ruled to strike down an apartheid-era law that banned husbands from using the surnames of their wives. The Constitutional Court called the law a "colonial import," the BBC reports. "In many African cultures, women retained their birth names after marriage, and children often took their mother's clan name," the court wrote. That changed, however, after the "arrival of the European colonizers and Christian missionaries, and the imposition of Western values," the court wrote. The court upheld a lower court's ruling that the law is unconstitutional and gave lawmakers two years to amend the legislation.

"The custom that a wife takes the husband's surname existed in Roman-Dutch law, and in this way was introduced into South African common law," the court wrote. The ruling came in a gender discrimination case filed by two couples, the AP reports. Andreas Nicolaas Bornman, husband of Jess Donnelly-Bornman, sought to have his last name hyphenated to include Donnelly, and Henry van der Merwe sought to take the surname of his wife, Jana Jordaan. Government ministers agreed the law was outdated and did not oppose the requests.