Ryanair forces South African customers to prove ID with Afrikaans test

Ryanair is making South African nationals take a general knowledge test in Afrikaans to prove their nationality before they are allowed to board its planes in the UK and the rest of Europe, sparking accusations of racial discrimination. The airline has been telling South African passport holders, including UK residents, that they will be turned away unless they complete the test, despite Afrikaans being only the third most-spoken language in the country, and its history of enforced use under apartheid. South African travellers said that they were humiliated by the unannounced test, which Ryanair said had been prompted by cases of fake passports but was not an official UK requirement. “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.” The airline’s 15-question test contains grammatical and spelling errors, and the questions include which side of the road South Africans drive on and the name of the country’s highest mountain. Dinesh Joseph, a South African resident in the UK, said he was told at the Ryanair desk that he could not board a flight home from Lanzarote in May without the test, despite not speaking Afrikaans. “It is the indignity of being told you can’t have it in the language you speak,” said Joseph, who has filed an official complaint. “You can’t profile and spot-check people like this.”<br/>