Afrikaans: The Language Which Still Divides

From Our Own Correspondent

BBC

News, News Commentary

4.4 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 11 June 2022

⏱️ 29 minutes

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Summary

Passengers travelling with Ryanair to the UK on a South African passport are being asked to complete a test to prove their nationality. The airline says this necessary to combat a substantial increase in fake South African passports - an airline found to have taken a passenger to the UK on a fake passport can face a fine of £2,000. However, the required test is in Afrikaans, which has outraged many South Africans who view it as the language of apartheid. Audrey Brown is one of them, and explains why. More than 100,000 Cubans have fled the island this year - the biggest surge since1980. Some have set off on the tested route towards Florida in small boats, but others are taking detours via other Latin American countries. So why this sudden exodus? Will Grant has been talking to Cubans about their new desperation to leave. When BBC producer Mat Morrison was sent to Dnipro in Ukraine, it was his first experience of reporting in a country at war. Slowly, he says, he has learned how to recognise the sound of missile attacks, and what to do when they land nearby. When he first stood for election, Emmanuel Macron promised to shake up French politics. One way he proposed to do this was by radically changing the make-up of parliament, encouraging people from all kinds of social and professional backgrounds to stand as MPs. Five years later, and the French people are returning to the polls, to vote for a new parliament. As Lucy Williamson reports, some of the political neophytes from the previous contest are now feeling rather jaded. The nomad's way of life is under threat. Peoples who have been on the move for millennia are increasingly being told by governments to give up their wandering and settle. Anthony Sattin has spent the past few years with nomads in different parts of the globe, including a group of shepherds, based in a small corner of the Middle East.

Transcript

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0:00.0	BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, Podcasts
0:05.4	Today the story of a modern-day mass exodus, why more than 100,000 Cubans have fled the
0:11.6	island this year. A journalist in Ukraine describes that first experience of being in a country
0:18.0	at war, lessons learned when a missile lands close by. Whatever happened to President
0:24.6	Markov's amateur recruits, the non-politicians he encouraged to become MPs, we hear how they
0:31.0	fare as French voters elect a new parliament. And we join the annual migration of Iran's
0:37.8	Bhaktiari tribe, and consider why the nomads way of life is under threat.
0:44.0	First, getting on a plane these days can mean facing a flurry of questions. Have you been
0:50.0	vaccinated against COVID? You may be asked, do you have proof of a recent negative test?
0:56.7	Sometimes a check on whether you're entitled to visit your country of destination. What
1:02.1	you probably would not expect is a general knowledge test, and yet that's what Ryan
1:06.7	Air has been giving its South African passengers. They face questions like, what is South Africa's
1:13.2	telephone dialing code, and who's the country's current president? The reason Ryan Air
1:19.4	said is that people have been travelling on fake South African passports, so they want
1:24.7	to shift genuine citizens from the fraudsters, but they've been conducting the test in the
1:30.4	Afrikaans language, and that's really outrage some South Africans among them, Audrey Brown.
1:38.0	I felt a spitting rage rising my chest and exploding to a torrent of words when I read
1:44.0	that Ryan Air was forcing South African passport holders to take a test in Afrikaans to verify
1:50.3	that they are indeed South African. The words I used to express my anger at the craftness
1:55.3	of this exercise were mostly Afrikaans words, a conslangafang I could wrestle snakes with
2:01.8	my bare hands. I am black of mixed heritage from South Africa, and I speak Afrikaans very
2:09.5	well. For people who know the history of South Africa, this may come as a bit of a surprise,
	...

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