The controversy over David Bullard's Sunday Times column - for which he has now apologised - has highlighted, once again, our capacity to obsess about "racism" while (often) being completely unable to recognise it when it presents itself in front of our noses. If a person puts on something vaguely resembling a black pointy hat, even in jest, they are liable to be dragged off and burnt at the stake of public opinion. No doubt it is better to err on the side of caution, the price of non-racialism being eternal vigilance and so on. Still, what is remarkable about these events is just how many people seem to fly in on them on broomsticks.

Over the past couple of weeks the Business Day columnist, Xolela Mangcu, has led a campaign not just against Bullard but against the white minority in general. In his initial column he called for the Sunday Times to sack Bullard for "racist speech", and for Bullard's "white colleagues" to ostracise him (‘or else').

Bullard had written that - in his imaginary European-free South Africa - "the various tribes of SA live healthy and peaceful lives, only occasionally engaging in a bit of ethnic cleansing." For Mangcu this was "hate speech" which represented "African people as savages capable only of undertaking ethnic cleansing."

The basis on which he justified his efforts to have Bullard silenced - as opposed to simply critiquing what he had said - was that there was a thin line between "legitimate criticism and offensive speech." He quoted one Robert Weissberg as saying, "because mere words can shade into actions and actions may have preventable injurious consequences, the right to one's views is not unbounded."

Mangcu was not suggesting that Bullard was inciting violence against black South Africans; but rather that his column could provoke the black majority into righteously inflicting "injurious consequences" on the white minority.

He elaborated on this theme in a follow-up column for Business Day headed "Racism relapse: white SA on the brink." He argued that those "white" readers who sought to defend Bullard against charges of racism, were being "short sighted," for they had the "most to lose" from the "racial conflagration" that their efforts were going to ignite.

"I still have the hope that sanity will prevail in the white world. I still have the hope that the all-too-easy defensive reflexes of racism will give way to long-term thinking about the safety of all those defenceless children, who will be left to reap the whirlwind of hate."

Mangcu's argument is, essentially, that if the "white community" did not pull themselves "back from the brink" - and refrain from recidivist expressions of "racism" - they would bring down some kind of violent retribution on themselves and their children. To avert this, he warned, the "white community" would not only have to denounce Bullard as one but publicly repent their views.

Mangcu's second column comes very close, in its convoluted way, to rationalising some kind of pogrom against the white minority. This is hardly contradicted by his assertion that "racism is not a black people's problem" as "No white people are being sent to the guillotines in this country."

Why is it that those who claim to be most expert at sniffing out witchcraft, are always the ones who end up handing out the poisoned apples? Mangcu accuses others of "racism" while indulging in racial demagoguery.

He also claims to believe in freedom of speech, while issuing thinly veiled threats of violence against those who might disagree with his opinion of them. (He has also said that Bullard should be imprisoned for his column.) The ultimate irony is that he ends up peddling a far more vicious stereotype of black South Africa than anything Bullard could be accused of having done. His second column is just one long invocation of swart gevaar.

Something inside of Mangcu seems to have snapped. However liberated he may currently feel he should realise that by surrendering to his hatreds in this way - as Mbeki did long ago - he has betrayed the very thing most central to his sense of self.

In a 1945 essay George Orwell wrote that "we are all more or less subject to this lunacy of believing that whole races or nations are mysteriously good or mysteriously evil. I defy any modern intellectual to look closely and honestly into his own mind without coming upon nationalistic loyalties and hatreds of one kind or another. It is the fact that he can feel the emotional tug of such things, and yet see them dispassionately for what they are, that gives him his status as an intellectual."