The SA Government says it was ‘taken aback’ by Irish budget airline Ryanair’s ‘backward profiling’ of passengers, who were given a pre-travel test in Afrikaans to prove they were legitimate passport holders.

According to a report in The Citizen, the airline has admitted it imposed a requirement for South Africans flying to Britain and Ireland to fill out a questionnaire issued in Afrikaans ‘due to the high prevalence of fraudulent South African passports’.

Passengers who fail to complete the questionnaire are denied travel and fully refunded for their tickets.

The Department of Home Affairs said in a statement: ‘We are taken aback by the decision of this airline because the department regularly communicates with all airlines to update them on how to validate South African passports, including the look and feel.’

The department also runs a 24-hour operations centre that airlines can access to verify South African passports.

The Pan South African Language Board, a state organisation tasked with promoting multilingualism, was disgusted by Ryanair’s method of verifying passports through an Afrikaans test.

‘We find this reckless decision by Ryanair quite problematic and is reminiscent of the old colonial and apartheid systematic subjugation of speakers of other languages, mainly black people, to racial and linguistic discrimination,’ the board’s head Lance Schultz said in a statement.

Full report in The Citizen