I was 5 years old when I learned to hate white people.

I didn't consider them human, capable of emotions like kindness, caring, empathy and love. If they were human, I would often ask myself, why were they all policemen, who regularly broke down our door in the middle of the night, who made me cower in terror as they ransacked our shack outside Johannesburg under the glare of torches, searching for my parents, determined to arrest them for the crime of living together as husband and wife? If whites were human, how could they not feel my pain in the tears I shed each time I saw my parents carted away to prison?

I recount this anecdote because the story of how I learned to hate is not unique. It has been repeated many times in areas of conflict and oppression across the Middle East, Africa, Europe and the ghettoes of the United States. It is a story that the World Conference Against Racism held in my homeland of South Africa, despite its acrimony, needed to heed to help break the cycle of hatred that is causing so much suffering and death in our world. Hatred can only be effectively combatted if we understand how it is learned and how it can be unlearned.

My mother taught me how to unlearn hatred. Ironically, she had more reasons than anyone I knew to hate -- not only white people who oppressed her and denied her jobs and treated her as a subhuman, but my father, too, whose inability to deal with his emasculation by apartheid made him often beat my mother up for trifles.

My mother had the wisdom to know that hatred thrives on hatred. She saw how white racism and oppression was transforming black children into haters. The only way to save me, my mother concluded, was by showing me love in action.

For a long time I was baffled by why she never hated people who were making her suffer, such as white people and my father. When I finally asked her, she replied, "No good can ever come out of hating, my child. But miracles can be achieved through the power of love."

My mother achieved many miracles through the power of love. I'll name two: First, she found ways to keep the spirits of her seven children alive and hopeful in a world where hunger, violence, pain, suffering and death were their constant companions. Second, despite having been denied the opportunity to go to school as a young girl, she endured the callousness of a racist system and sacrificed even her well-being to see me, her first-born, educated. For months she trudged to the police station to beg for a permit without which I couldn't register at the local tribal school, only to be told that she couldn't be issued the permit without my birth certificate, which I didn't have because I was delivered at home. She'd then go to the clinic to beg for a birth certificate, only to be told that she couldn't be issued one without the permit from the police station.

She was finally helped by a white nun, who cried when she heard my mother's story, then stormed into the clinic's office and demanded that my mother be given a birth certificate, which she was. The nun's tears -- the first I'd ever seen streak a white face -- shattered the stereotype I'd long believed, that all white people were inhuman, unfeeling, racist.

This personal grappling with the furies of hatred has taught me several important lessons. One must always remember that human life is equally precious. One must have the courage to constantly assess one's attitudes and behavior, rather than assume that one is beyond evil. If one has a religion, one must remember that it is impossible to love God if one is incapable of loving fellow human beings.

One must have no double standard when it comes to denouncing hatred. One must give others the benefit of the doubt and attempt to walk in their shoes. One must be willing to communicate, to learn, to acknowledge and affirm the humanity of others by treating them with kindness, empathy, tolerance, forgiveness, understanding and love, out of the conviction that one is not fully human until and unless one treats others as such, including one's enemies. And finally, one must learn to judge people not by their skin color, race, religion, nationality, creed, gender or sexual orientation, but by the contents of their hearts.

Racism can best be fought if we recognize our common humanity and interdependence, and if we all cultivate the qualities needed for mutual coexistence and survival as a species in this hut called Earth.

Mark Mathabane, the author of "Kaffir Boy" and "Miriam's Song" and director of multicultural education at the Catlin Gabel School, can be reached via e-mail at mark@mathabane.com.

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