Fusi Motaung: Lihle Mtshali's "Haitian youngsters feel lash of xenophobia," (November 28) refers.

Lihle's way of looking at this problem of black-on-black hatred is eye-opening. As a result, I have come to believe that the so-called xenophobic attacks in South Africa last year were over-blown and poorly analysed. Do you ever wonder, Editor, why it is that black people in South Africa, in the rest of the African continent and everywhere else - including the US - never, or seldom, attack whites? The way I see this is that black people hate other black people, period.

It seems to me that white-on-black racism has damaged us (black people) so much that the only way for black people to feel sane and human is for them (us) to emulate the white racists by turning hatred on our fellow black brothers and sisters.

The racism we know has not accorded - not that it should - a black person the platform and reason to be racist towards white people.

If that had been so, we would be seeing black people going out of their way to discriminate against, segregate and enslave white people; we'd be seeing black people unleashing xenophobia on white people.

Secondly, racism, with its concomitant exclusion of black people from fair economic activities and prosperity, and maiming of the culture, has us (black people) believing that to live a life of comfort like a white person is to behave the way they do - including being racist towards a particular racial group of people.

In his book, Is it coz I'm Black? Ndumiso Ngcobo had this to say about xenophobia in South Africa:

"I've worked in a multinational corporation. I've watched foreign nationals from UK, the Netherlands and Germany trickle into the company to take up senior positions without a hitch. All good.

"And I have watched the reaction of my professional colleagues with degrees when a foreign national from Ghana or Cameroon walked through the door: resistance from day one.

"It slowly dawned on me that this whole thing was really symptomatic of a deep self-hatred for people of the same appearance.

"If it was really about xenophobia, there would have been a stampede at the airports as the British nationals fled the marauding mobs."