June 30 will forever be etched in my mind as the day I was deeply ashamed to be South African.

I grew up in the so-called “New South Africa”, the “Rainbow Nation”, where we were sold an idea, a dream that so many of us have spent our lives hoping and praying would materialise. Instead, I have watched South Africans turn on the weakest among us: foreigners. We have swallowed the hatred and blame that belongs at the feet of our government and spewed it at the very people who need our protection.

That dream has gone up in smoke.

Our beautiful, fragile nation is assaulting Malawians and driving away Zimbabweans – people who came here hoping only to build a better life for themselves and their families.
I watch video after video of adults and children attacking other human beings, and I feel sick to the pit of my stomach.
When apartheid ended, didn’t we promise never to forget? Didn’t we swear never again to hate “the other”, “the stranger”?

If you take part in these marches, look down at your hands and ask yourself what separates you from the white man who was told to hate black skin – and believed it.
During apartheid, the government manufactured die swart gevaar – “the black danger” – as propaganda, using fear as a tool of control. Isn’t that exactly what is happening again? Only this time, the monster in the darkness is not the black South African; it is the black foreigner.

“They’ve come to steal our jobs and our women,” people say.
How many jobs have you created now that you’ve chased them away? Are women any safer, or are they still being raped by the real tsotsis among us?
People defend this hatred by insisting, “It’s not xenophobia. We just want the law to be obeyed.”

Where did this sudden devotion to the law come from? Was it when we drove through red traffic lights without a second thought? When we fudged our taxes or connected electricity illegally or built homes on land that wasn’t ours?
Or is it only certain laws that deserve our respect? The ones that don’t inconvenience us?

Cry, the Beloved Country, Alan Paton famously wrote. Published in the very year apartheid became law, it was a powerful protest against the racial divisions tearing South Africa apart.
We are crying again, Alan. Africa is weeping for her children.