ORTLAND, Ore. -- We are all capable of learning hatred — even the kind of hatred that produces suicide bombers. If conditions are ripe, and if no steps are regularly taken to inoculate us against this all too common human poison, it can make anyone kill without remorse. It is only by accepting this human truth that we can turn back violence in places like the Middle East today, as it was turned back in my homeland, South Africa, a decade ago.

For me, learning to hate was as simple a process as learning how to love. All it took was a gradual twisting of my humanity while I was growing up under apartheid in the impoverished ghetto of Alexandra. I concluded early that white people could not be human. If they were, why did they not feel my pain? Why were they complicit in an inhuman system that confined me and my family to a shack without running water or electricity and made me sleep on pieces of cardboard, scavenge for food at the garbage dump, wear rags, and watch helplessly as black children died from preventable diseases?

Frequently white policemen enforcing the hated pass laws would invade our neighborhood in the middle of the night, break down our door and march my parents half naked out of bed, interrogate and humiliate my father and then arrest him for the crimes of being unemployed and harboring his family as illegal aliens in "white" South Africa. Had I had a gun, I would have killed the police with relish. But they had all the guns. So all I could do was nurse my hatred and water its poisonous tree with the stories of the collective suffering of black people.

As a teenager when the black rebellion against apartheid began in 1976, I was gleeful at the news that collaborators with the apartheid system had been necklaced — embittered mobs had put gasoline-soaked tires around their necks and ignited them. I echoed the demand of my radicalized peers that liberation movements like the African National Congress and the Pan African National Congress should stop talking about peaceful change and instead provide us with AK-47's and bombs so we could storm white homes, kindergartens, shopping centers, schools, buses and playgrounds in the name of revenge.

The main reason why I didn't succumb to the powerful urges to violence was my mother. Over the years her example had imperceptibly taught me lessons that, when the devil of hate came to collect his due, awakened that inner restraint — call it conscience — without which no one is beyond evil. The most pivotal of those lessons, which I remember learning when I was 7, was that not all white people were unfeeling monsters like the police.

My mother had been repeatedly denied a birth certificate for me — a necessary document for school registration — because she did not have a permit proving that our family had a right to live in Alexandra. But we couldn't get the permit without the birth certificate. My mother asked a white nun for help. When she realized the Catch-22 my mother was trapped in, the nun cried. I remember being stunned by her tears, for they were the first I'd ever seen streak a white face. I remember saying to myself: "She feels my mother's pain. She's human after all, not a monster."

Such experiences, few though they were, made me wonder, during those years when black hatred of apartheid made even sane people do the unconscionable, if by killing whites I would also kill people like the nun whose empathy had given my mother hope and whose help had saved me, by making it possible for me to get an education, from the dead-end life of the street and gangs. As long as there was that chance, I couldn't bring myself to kill in the name of hate.

Guns, bombs and tanks cannot defeat hatred. It can be vanquished only by humanity, and the best way I know to do it is that which South Africans, under the leadership of Nelson Mandela, used to prevent hatred from becoming the legacy of the next generation. Against all odds, and some will say against human nature, South Africans chose a path that moved their beloved country beyond the darkness of mutually destructive hatred and revenge into the light of reconciliation and forgiveness.

To travel that arduous path, which alone offers us the security we crave, requires a recognition that one is not fully human until one acknowledges and affirms the humanity of others — including one's enemies. Ultimately, the enemy is within the human family and not without. And once we acknowledge that, we will all have the courage to speak the language of reconciliation empathetically as we work to conquer hatred.

Mark Mathabane is the author of "Kaffir Boy."