(screenshot, Twitter)
(screenshot, Twitter)
  • Over the past 24 hours, South African Twitter has been riotous as hundreds of users have assumed fake Afrikaans profiles.
  • It started when a user pretended to be an Afrikaner, and asked for money to escape "genocide".
  • Hilarity ensued.

“Afrikaans” has been trending for the past 24 hours on South African Twitter as hundreds of users changed their profiles to resemble Afrikaners.

Tweeting in broken Afrikaans, users translated popular Afrikaans terms with phrases such as “assoblief” for please, “fumbleer” for fumble and “kontrol” for control being born

(screenshot, Twitter)
(screenshot, Twitter)

“Afrikaans our Moeder taal. Ons speak Afrikaans today (Afrikaans is our mother tongue, we speak Afrikaans today),” @jonasnghishidi tweeted.

@MisterPule tweeted “: Ons vat ales, die land en die taal (we take everything, the land and the language).”

Twitter user Gershwin Louw (@Gershforthewin), who briefly changed his profile to Sonja Koekemoer on Thursday afternoon, said Afrikaans started trending shortly after Twitter user @_uSboh pretended to try and escape the country.

Attached to @_uSboh’s tweet was a Paypal account where people could donate money.

@_uSboh asking for money to flee the country on Tw
@_uSboh asking for money to flee the country on Twitter (supplied)
(supplied)
(supplied)

“He acted like a white Afrikaner trying to get money to escape the country,” Louw told Business Insider South Africa.

“And then Twitter just ran with the whole idea.”

Louw said it died down by Friday morning, when people most people restored their former profile pictures and names.  

“Generally the response was positive, most people found it funny,” he said. “People who couldn’t understand Afrikaans hated it.”

For more go to Business Insider South Africa.

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