Editorial
Johannesburg - You would be forgiven if you thought news that the British government has put an Afrikaans language test in place to check that the holders of South African passports are in fact who they purport to be was an April Fool’s joke.
The problem is, this isn’t April 1.
As we report today, there have been several cases of South African passport holders being asked to fill out mini exam scripts of up to 15 questions about South Africa – in Afrikaans.
The question though is far more profound. What is the essence of being South African? Is it knowledge of your country? Is it support for particular sports teams? Is it multilingualism?
It’s all of these – and none of them. Most of us can speak English, not all of us can speak another of the 10 other official languages and white South Africans are famously not very multilingual. Indeed, those who are would normally count Afrikaans as their second language.
And therein lies the rub: even though Afrikaans is a truly indigenous South African language and now spoken by more coloured and black citizens than white, many black South Africans can’t speak it at all.
Whichever way you cut it, the test is discriminatory in the extreme – even against born-free white English-speaking South Africans who never had to undergo national service or be subjected to Christian National Higher Education.
In fact, given our 30% academic benchmark, it’s doubtful whether too many of us would get full marks for the test even if it was in English.
But perhaps the biggest question is why such a test would be necessary in the first place.
And that’s where the problem originates: the number of fake SA passports being carried through UK borders calls the validity of our documents into question, pointing to yet another catastrophic failure by the Department of Home Affairs.