Ryanair has dropped a requirement that South African passport holders pass a test written in Afrikaans – a language with a racist heritage that many South Africans don’t speak – to prove their nationality before boarding certain flights after the policy was widely criticized as discriminatory and nonsensical.
In an email on Wednesday, the company confirmed that the quiz would no longer be used, citing statements by its CEO, Michael O’Leary, that it “makes no sense”. The comments were first reported by the BBC.
South Africans were angry about the test, which was based on a language imposed on the country’s black majority by the former white-led apartheid government. Today, Afrikaans is the third most used household language in the country at 13 percent.
“They really offended an entire nation,” said Dinesh Joseph, a 45-year-old South African leadership and management trainer who had to pass the test to return from the Canary Islands to London.
Ryanair’s face comes as South Africans prepare on Thursday to commemorate a groundbreaking moment in their resistance to Afrikaans: the anniversary of the 1976 Soweto uprising, in which thousands of protesters, mostly black schoolchildren, marched against the efforts of the government to require education in Afrikaans in school. Police fired at the protesters and killed hundreds.
The language’s racist legacy continues to resonate with many people in South Africa, where Zulu is spoken in more households, 23 percent, than in any of the country’s more than 10 official languages. (English is the language of communication of 8 percent of South Africans.)
Some South African travelers reported feeling shocked and humiliated by the required test. Many South Africans expressed their frustration on social media, Ryanair’s demand racist and even calls for an airline boycott†
Despite the complaints, Ryanair adhered to the testing requirement for weeks, saying it had been implemented for flights to Britain due to a “high prevalence” of fraudulent passports from South Africa. The airline, a low-cost airline based in Dublin, also characterized the quiz as “a simple questionnaire”. It asked travelers to name things such as South Africa’s largest city or the national animal. Those who could not answer correctly would be refused entry to the aircraft and their money refunded.
Although the South African government had published recent cases of passport fraud, it was critical of Ryanair’s tactics, saying the airline had access to systems to verify the authenticity of passports.
“We are surprised by this airline’s decision,” Siya Qoza, a spokesman for South Africa’s interior minister, said in a statement last week, adding that the test was a “backward profiling system”.
Ryanair did not say why it chose Afrikaans as the language for the test. And Mr O’Leary expressed little remorse for the policy, calling the South African government’s allegations of profiling “nonsense,” according to Reuters.
“Our team did a test in Afrikaans of 12 simple questions, such as what is the name of the mountain outside Pretoria?” he said during a press conference in Brussels on Tuesday. “They have no qualms about completing that.”
Joseph called Ryanair’s turnaround “a bittersweet victory.” The airline took a step in the right direction, he said, but complained about a lack of explanations about liability for what he called an “insanely discriminatory” practice.
Although Mr Joseph, who spoke English when he was growing up, passed the test using Google translate, he said Ryanair had to acknowledge the emotional distress caused by the policy.
“I’d like to see an apology, especially to the people who went through it,” he said, “and also just the South African people in general.”