Pretoria – The insistence of Irish budget airline Ryanair in making South African passport holders take a test in Afrikaans before boarding flights to the UK borders on discrimination, Pan South African Language Board has said.
“Just when we thought things couldn’t be more bizarre in our international community, along comes Ryanair which a policy which clearly smacks of discrimination because in effect what it is doing is not only trampling on our South African constitutional democracy but also it is adverse and not congruent with our linguistic diversity,” Pan South African Language Board (PanSalb) chief executive officer Lance Craig Schultz told eNCA.
He said the policy also showed ignorance of the UN Declaration on Human Rights.
“What it has done is that it has excluded mother tongue languages where the vast majority of South Africans would not be able to respond to a questionnaire which has been structured in Afrikaans. We believe it is bizarre and we have gone on public record also to state that we are not happy with it,” said Schultz.
“We will be supporting the Department of International Relations to seek recourse and make sure that there is remedy put in place very quickly.”
A number of South Africans living abroad have taken their frustrations to social media platforms and accused the UK of blocking them at airports unless they pass the controversial Afrikaans test.
South Africa has 11 official languages, and many commenting on social media stated that they cannot understand Afrikaans, while others were more offended because they associate the language with apartheid.
Ryanair has defended the test, saying it weeds out people travelling on fraudulent South African passports.
“Due to the high prevalence of fraudulent South African passports, we require passengers travelling to the UK to fill out a simple questionnaire issued in Afrikaans,” the BBC quoted the airline as saying.
IOL