The killing of seven white soldiers by a deranged black officer has given South Africans cause, yet again, to ponder the depth of racial divisions more than five years after the installation of a government formally committed to non-racialism.
The divisions lie just beneath the surface in virtually every sphere of the new society, in contra-distinction to the public relations image of the harmonious "Rainbow Nation" at peace with itself. They are particularly prevalent and combustible in the new, post-apartheid South African National Defence Force (SANDF).
Any doubts about that have been dispelled by the bloodletting at Tempe military base, near Bloemfontein, where a black soldier, demented with anger, turned his gun on white SANDF members, killing seven of them and wounding another five. The immediate catalyst of Lieut Madubela's homicidal behaviour appears to have been the suspension of part of his pay following his return to base, 10 days late, after being granted compassionate leave to attend his father's funeral in Transkei.
The Defence Minister, Mr Mosiuoa Lekota, and the Defence Force Chief, Mr Siphiwe Nyanda, appalled by the shooting and conscious of its capacity to ignite new animosities, have sought to calm the situation by counselling SANDF members, politicians and journalists not to characterise it as evidence of racial hatred.
Mr Lekota appears to suggest that its origins might lie in the trauma experienced by Madubela after his father's death and funeral. Nobody has "psychoanalysed" the relationship between Madubela and his father and determined the impact of the father's death on the son, he notes.
But even if Madubela was unhinged by his father's demise, that does not explain why he focused his murderous anger on white soldiers.
Amid the whirl of reports, counter-reports and denials emanating from the Tempe base after the shooting, it seems incontrovertible that Madubela did not open fire at random. If he had, he would almost certainly have killed black soldiers, particularly as the overwhelming majority of troops at the base are black.
Moreover Madubela, a former combatant of the Azanian People's Liberation Army (Apla), the armed wing of the Pan Africanist Congress, is reported to have encountered but ignored blackeres colleagues on his maniacal shooting spree.
Sociology Professor Jacklyn Cock observes that the process of integrating blacks and whites into common institutions - or transforming formerly white-controlled institutions - is particularly fraught in the case of the SANDF.
Prof Cock, co-editor of a definitive book on the military in post-apartheid South Africa, observes that the SANDF is an amalgam of armies with different traditions, specifically the former white-controlled South African Defence Force (SADF) and the former predominantly black guerrilla armies of the African National Congress (Umkhonto we Sizwe or MK) and the Pan Africanist Congress (Apla).
But, she adds, the process of integration has been skewered in favour of the old SADF because it, like the emerging SANDF, is a conventional rather than a guerrilla military force.
The result is that the upper ranks of the SANDF, like those of SADF, are still largely occupied by whites, which is resented by mainly black combatants of from MK and Apla. Another consequence ensues: the grievances of former MK and Apla members are, to quote Prof Cock, racialised and thus directed against the controlling white officer corps.
Many white officers have not yet adapted to the new South Africa, she states, referring to their plans to celebrate the anniversary of the Kassinga bombing in Angola in 1978, in which many black civilians were killed by South African warplanes.
A sign or even a warning of racial divisions at Tempe has been staring commanding officers in the face since mid-1998, when a truck carrying a wide range of weapons and a huge quantity of ammunition including automatic rifes and rocket-launchers was hijacked. The truck's drivers, both black, were later found dead by police divers at the botton of the Modder River.
Three men, all alleged members of a fanatical Afrikaner nationalist organisation, Die Volk, all white and one a staff sergeant from Tempe, have since been charged with the hijack and the murder of the driver. Now on full pay pending the outcome of the trial, the sergeant was even reinstated in his old post until the media exposed what seemed to black South Africans to be official condonation of his alleged actions.
At least $20 million worth of delicate Chinese porcelain could be recovered from the wreck of a Dutch East India Company ship, the Brederode, which sank off South Africa over two centuries ago, marine experts said yesterday in Cape Town.