Given the daft things that some people get up to, I have decided to award a Mampara accolade to public figures who engage in really silly behaviour from time to time. A ‘mampara’, a term used throughout Southern Africa, is a foolish person or idiot.

The winner of the inaugural Africa Beat Mampara title is the fellow who runs an Irish low-budget airline called Ryanair, which now subjects UK-bound South African passport holders to a test in Afrikaans to prove their nationality. The rationale behind this bizarre move, which has caused outrage among South Africans, is that there have been “substantially increased cases of fraudulent South African passports being used to enter the UK”. Those who fail the test are not allowed on the airline’s flights.

This mampara must be told that only about 13% of South Africans speak Afrikaans as a first language. Zulu and Xhosa are more widely spoken, being the mother tongues of about 25% and 15% of this country’s population respectively. It would also be illogical to use proficiency in Zulu as confirmation of one’s South African-ness, because there are many South Africans who cannot string together a few Zulu words in a coherent sentence, despite the language being the most spoken.

To be frank, Ryanair’s ‘speak Afrikaans or don’t fly with us’ policy did not come as a complete surprise to me. While on a conference call last month, our mampara – whose given name is Michael O’Leary – had listeners blushing in embarrassment after launching into a profanity-laden tirade against Boeing over delayed deliveries of 737 MAX planes, which he said had forced Ryanair to pull back its spring and summer schedules.

Do I hear someone saying the Afrikaans quiz could have been the brainchild of an overzealous underling and it would be unfair to blame O’Leary without knowing all the facts? My retort: he is the boss, and the buck stops with him.

Ryanair should find a more credible way of screening out people travelling on South African passports they are not entitled to. Acting pro bono, I will show the mampara in the remainder of this article how this can be done – and it’s very simple.

Just compile a list of those quintessentially South African expressions that any middle-class individual can reasonably be expected to understand – be they mother- tongue speakers of Afrikaans, English, Ndebele, Pedi, Sotho, Swati, Tswana, Tshonga, Xhosa, Venda or Zulu. The middle-class caveat is informed by the assumption that anyone with the wherewithal to afford the airfare to distant Britain is not your typical madala from the platteland.

The first expressions on my list would be ‘right now’ and ‘now now’. The former is more urgent than ‘now’, with a higher probability of something actually happening, whereas the latter means ‘shortly’. ‘Now now’, derived from the Afrikaans nou-nou, is sooner than ‘just now’.

Then there is ‘hectic’, which means ‘crazy’ in the South African context and is used when expressing amazement, as in: “Traffic on the M1 freeway was hectic this morning.”

Conversations between middle-class South Africans are also often sprinkled with ‘Is it?’, which is the equivalent of ‘Is that so?’

And when South Africans talk about ‘taxis’, they won’t be referring to the elite cabs of the Western world, but to the often unroadworthy vehicles upon which the majority of the people of this country rely for public transport.

My list would also include ‘robots’, which are not the contraptions that Elon Musk hopes will be joining the human workforce at Tesla now now, but road intersections controlled by traffic lights.

South Africa is also renowned for its militant trade unions, which call strikes all too frequently. A key feature of the strikes is ‘toyi-toying’, known elsewhere as the protest dance.