South Africa is reeling from the xenophobic attacks that continue to rage across the country. Far from dying down, these violent incidents seem to be spreading and intensifying. These events raise important questions about our society, and paint a very gloomy picture of our national psyche.

The vast majority of South African history is one of division, both cultural and racial, and it seems that that history is shaping the events of today. Blacks fought whites, Zulus fought Xhosas, Boers fought the English.

On every level, both between and within every cultural grouping, South Africans have been taught to fight each other by our fathers and their fathers before them. The xenophobic attacks that have thrown our country into turmoil serve as a bitter reminder that our history of inter-racial and inter-cultural conflict continues to harm our nation to this day.

For some years there have been widespread protests in poor communities over service delivery. To many in these communities, it has increasingly felt as if their pleas have fallen on deaf ears, and that the government will never take notice of their suffering.

Policy failures and lack of communication from the government have allowed these grievances to fester, but none of these frustrations can find an outlet when dealing with the highest bureaucracy in the land. Foreigners, however, are close at hand. They are an easy target, they are offered only minimal protection in our legal system, and, best of all, they are easy to blame and even easier to punish.

This culture of blame and retribution can only lead to social and economic disaster, and it has done so time and again throughout Africa and indeed the world. The problem is compounded by the fact that blame can indeed be apportioned for the current circumstances of the poor and downtrodden in South Africa.

We can blame generations of colonialism, apartheid, racial discrimination and institutionalised injustice. But these causes cannot be punished. They cannot be reprimanded or altered, and the results remain long after the perpetrators have gone to their graves. There is little satisfaction to be gained by condemning our past, but it should not escape our notice that continued inter-cultural hatred condemns our future as well.

Our government has done little to foster inter-cultural forgiveness and understanding, for the thrust of government policy implies that inter-cultural or inter-racial competition is at the very heart of South African life.

Our policy-makers are determined to redistribute land from white farmers to black ones, in business our hiring policies are structured on explicitly racial grounds, and the highest levels of our economy are governed by black economic empowerment and similar race-based laws. The policy environment is one that accepts the fallacy that there are limited resources, and that cultures and races need to compete for these resources.

In South Africa we have an environment where the vast majority of our resources remain untapped and unutilised. We have a workforce that is large and underemployed, but we have failed to train them. We have well established infrastructure that is sufficient only for some, but we insist on redistributing ownership of that insufficiency rather than building more capacity.

We have a nation that is desperate to heal the wounds that have been inflicted on us for generations, but we have compounded the injury by framing all of our arguments in the terms of the oppressors. We are a nation divided and dividing, as factions replace families and foreigners replace friends.

We have been taught to blame one another. We fail to see each other as people, rather we find it easier to dehumanise one another and put each other into categories of culpability. Our neighbours are not people; they are part of a monolithic faceless group that is the source of all our woes. We are not maiming and burning human beings, we are punishing perpetrators. We are administering justice.

The irony is that race and culture are only illusions. They serve as proxies for social status and economic power. They are arbitrary groupings that we assign to ourselves and to others so that we can simultaneously assign value.

For a racist white person, all the negative aspects in our country can be assigned to the blacks. For a xenophobic black person it will be foreigners that are to blame for social ills. It is a quick and easy way of saying who is bad or good, since those values are seen to depend not on an individual but on group membership.

History has taught us the danger of these methods of thought, and the current violence sweeping parts of the country serves as a powerful example of it. Perhaps one day, South Africans will discover that our strength flows from our unity and our humanity, not from the colour of our skins or the languages we speak. It is with infinite sadness that we must acknowledge that that day is not today.

*Marco MacFarlane is the head of research at the South African Institute of Race Relations. This article was published by the institute in SAIRR Today on May 23 2008