About 4.4 million hadronic decays of Z bosons, recorded by the OPAL detector at
LEP at a centre-of-mass energy of around $\sqrt{s}= 91.2$\,GeV, are used to
determine the mean charged particle multiplicities for the three light quark
flavours.  Events from primary u, d, and s quarks are tagged by selecting 
characteristic particles which carry a large fraction of the beam energy. The 
charged particle multiplicities are measured in the hemispheres opposite to 
these particles. An unfolding procedure is applied to obtain these
multiplicities for each primary light quark flavour. This yields
\begin{displaymath}
\langle n_u \rangle=\mathrm{17.77\pm 0.51\,^{\displaystyle +0.86}_{\displaystyle -1.20}}\,,\;
\langle n_d \rangle =\mathrm{21.44\pm 0.63\,^{\displaystyle +1.46}_{\displaystyle -1.17}}\,,\;
\langle n_s \rangle =\mathrm{20.02\pm 0.13\,^{\displaystyle +0.39}_{\displaystyle -0.37}}\,,\;
\end{displaymath}
where statistical and systematic errors are given.  The results for 
$\langle n_u \rangle$ and $\langle n_d \rangle$ are almost fully statistically
anti-correlated. Within the errors the result is consistent with the 
flavour independence of the strong interaction for the particle
multiplicities in events from the light up, down, and strange quarks.