Ryanair has dramatically changed course on its controversial policy of using an Apartheid-era language to test if passengers are South African.
The airline’s chief executive Michael O’Leary revealed that they decided “we didn’t think it was appropriate” and it “doesn’t make any sense”.
Afrikaans – which critics branded racist - was made mandatory by South Africa’s former white leaders when the country was under white-minority rule.
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CEO O’Leary said in Brussels: “Our team issued a test in Afrikaans of 12 simple questions like: what’s the name of the mountain outside Pretoria?
“They have no difficulty completing that, but we didn’t think it was appropriate either.
“So, we have ended the Afrikaans test because it doesn’t make any sense.”
Figures from South Africa’s 2011 Census show that Afrikaans is used by just 12% of the country’s 58 million people as a first language and is the country’s third most spoken language after Zulu and IsiXhosa.
But Ryanair adopted a policy which required South African passport users en route to the UK to prove their nationality by taking a test in Afrikaans.
The airline explained at the time that the policy was due to fake passports, but it did not explain why the Afrikaans language was chosen for the quiz.
Ryanair’s test was a list of general knowledge questions about South Africa such as naming its capital city, its president, and its international dialling code.
UK authorities responded to Ryanair’s test by stating that it does not require this test to be carried out.
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