[imagesource: Thiago Prudencio / SOPA Images / Shutterstock]
Travelling through airports in the time of COVID-19 and vaccine certificates and all the rest is stressful enough without having to be publicly outed as, in my case, a soutie.
My Afrikaans use and thus proficiency has dropped off since high school and when I first heard about Ryanair’s controversial Afrikaans test, I wondered if I would pass.
Ryanair is an Irish ultra-low-cost airline headquartered in Dublin.
We’ll get to that in a bit, but let’s lay out the basics via News24:
South Africans flying to and from the UK on Ryanair have reported being asked to complete a general knowledge test in Afrikaans or be denied entry to their flight…
One South African said she had travelled to Dublin and had been asked to complete the test during check-in at London’s Stansted Airport before she could be issued a boarding pass.
She claimed she was told the form would prove she was South African because there had been an increase in fraudulent South African passports.
The woman says she was told she had failed the test and thus would not be able to board her flight.
Fortunately, she had in her possession her work permit, as well as her passport with multiple valid visas, and was then allowed to board.
Capetonian Dinesh Joseph told a similar story to IOL. He’s lived in London since 2016 and was returning to the UK on Ryanair from Lanzarote in the Spanish Canary Islands.
“They took my passport and my boarding pass and handed me two photocopied pages with questions in Afrikaans that were printed skew. There was no letterhead, no logo or stamp, nothing to prove it was an official document.”
He was told he didn’t have a choice in the matter because it was a “Ryanair rule” that South African travellers had to follow even though he told them he could not speak Afrikaans and would have to Google the answers.
“Luckily my primary school memories kicked in,” he said.
He was allowed to fly but said “he was mad as hell that they treated him as if he was ‘a monkey'”. After suffering that humiliation, Joseph tried to lodge an official complaint but never heard back.
Would you pass the test? Here are the questions with the answers already filled in:
I see @Ryanair is happy to profile people entering Ireland racially to see if they are really South African. You need to fill out a form in Afrikaans to prove your citizenship. @DIRCO_ZA are you aware of this? @tumisole can you help get some answers?🤷🏽♂️ pic.twitter.com/vzXWDpSy2j
— Gundo Mawela (@GundoMawela) June 2, 2022
Joseph shared images of his question sheet as well:
For those who are really struggling, MyBroadband has a table with the English translation:
As the backlash grew, the British High Commission in South Africa clarified on Twitter that the questionnaire was not a UK government requirement.
The Embassy of Ireland in South Africa also made it clear that they do not require a language proficiency or general knowledge test.
Ryanair has defended its use of the test, quoting Section 40 of the UK Immigration and Asylum Act 1999 and saying it “has a responsibility to ensure that passengers are correctly documented for travel to their destination”.
More of that statement via The Daily Maverick:
“Due to the recent increase in passengers attempting to travel on fraudulent South African passports, our handling agents may request passengers travelling on a South African passport and who are flagged during procedural security profiling, to complete a simple questionnaire, as an additional safety assessment to confirm whether they are correctly documented before travel. As language proficiency is the least intrusive further safety assessment method, this questionnaire is conducted through Afrikaans, one of South Africa’s most prevalent official languages.”
We will soon have 12 official languages (South African Sign Language has been approved as the 12th) and picking out Afrikaans for the test is an interesting choice.
Some have called it racist:
@Ryanair is restricting the movement of South African people based on whether or not they speak the language of the white Afrikaans minority. Not a good look. Pretty racist. https://t.co/xcIOIzYxAb pic.twitter.com/ig88PrSiwM
— Fred Raybould (@FredRaybould) June 5, 2022
A number of South Africans subjected to the test spoke with The Financial Times:
“It’s extremely exclusionary . . . they didn’t think about the implications” of the test in light of South Africa’s history, said Zinhle Novazi, a South African in the UK who does not normally speak Afrikaans but was made to take the test in order to board a flight from Ibiza last week. “It definitely does amount to indirect racial discrimination.”
…Nomfundo Dlamini, a South African in the UK who said she was also given the test alongside colleagues, told South African national radio this week that Ryanair’s policy was “Apartheid 2.0 . . . further oppression, further discrimination.”
All in all, just a terrible look for the airline.
