Just in case you were wondering on whether or not you’re married, alive, or if any of those passports and ID books you applied ages ago for are ready yet, rejoice because the South African Department of Home Affairs does in fact provide a nifty resource to grant you the answers to these and any other questions you might have.
Apart from the nifty little SMS query portal they have where you can either SMS the keyword ID, P M or L followed by your ID number to 32551, they also have a online lookup function, situated at http://www.home-affairs.gov.za/enquiry/get_status.asp.
Unfortunately they also possess a slightly inept webmaster because he/she/it has gone and screwed up the URLs on the page by using backslashes instead of forward slashes in the appropriate places. Never fear though, the links to work if you just do the trouble of correcting all the offending slashes. And for those of you too lazy to do even that, here are the URLs already fixed up for you:
– ID Book Application Enquiry
– Passport Book Application Enquiry
– Marital Status Enquiry
– Verification of ID status (Deceased/Alive)
There you go, now you know. (Oh and if you are wondering why the fixing of the forward slashes was important, while the original page loads just fine on the incorrect URL, unfortunately the post data on the form submit didn’t quite like it’s newfound, faulty location.)