Racism remains a serious problem in post-apartheid South Africa. To deny that is to negate the power of history.
One chapter in South Africa's past includes an era in which slavery was writ large, with almost all the slaves being people of a darker hue, and in which indigenous blacks were deprived of their land by settlers from Britain and Europe.
Another, more recent, chapter tells of a society which allotted places to its citizens in a legally buttressed racial hierarchy according to their skin colour: whites were assigned to the top rungs, blacks to the bottom, and "coloureds" and Indians to the intermediate.
Recurring murderous racial attacks by whites on blacks and blacks on whites are a reminder that post-apartheid South Africa is not a utopia founded on the brotherhood of man (or the sisterhood of woman) and in which race is regarded as a mere accident of birth.
But there is another more positive side to contemporary South Africa which should not be discounted in any assessment.
It is a society in which the equality of all people is recognised and proclaimed in the preamble to a founding Constitution forged during lengthy negotiations between people of all races.
For every resurgence of racism there are dozens of manifestations of inter-racial harmony and of solidarity across the racial barrier on the sports field and in face of danger.
No less a person than President Thabo Mbeki has chosen to highlight the image of a white girl holding hands with a black friend in Soweto as the symbol of the emerging new society. He has publicly thanked white farmers for helping their black counterparts.
That does not mean Mr Mbeki thinks race is not a problem in South Africa. He does. Hence his role in pressing for last year's national conference on racism and in helping to secure South Africa as the venue for the world conference on racism, racial discrimination and xenophobia. But he is not blind to the progress which has been made in moving away from the past.
South Africa is characterised by a kaleidoscope of realities. There is the racial past and there are the too frequent reminders of it. But there are contesting images of an inchoate society reaching towards a common nationhood forged from disparate racial components.
A major national survey, commissioned by the Institute of Race Relations and conducted by a sociologist, Dr Lawrence Schlemmer, challenges the salience attributed to race and racism by political rhetoric (some of it emanating from the ruling African National Congress) and by media headlines.
Thus, Dr Schlemmer finds that significantly more South Africans think that race relations have improved in recent years than the opposite. The ratio of those who think race relations are better, compared with those who reckon they are worse, is nearly 2:1 (48 per cent against 25 per cent).
While - to quote another finding - more than a quarter of South Africans believe their treatment by compatriots constitutes a serious problem, in the vast majority of cases the problem is one of interpersonal relations between people of the same race. Only a small minority of those with serious problems attribute them to race.
"Race and racial antipathy certainly do not dominate in social interaction", Dr Schlemmer states. "The country is not awash with racial friction."
But, not unsurprisingly given the complexity of South African society, Dr Schlemmer's findings - based on a representative sample of 2,144 South Africans of all races - contain an apparent anomaly: the responses to the abstract question of whether respondents think racism is a serious problem point to an affirmative response of nearly 60 per cent.
But the results show that more than 50 per cent of those who rate racism a serious problem are hard put to relate an experience in which they personally were victims of racism.
That finding - which pertains to South Africa today, not South Africa of yesteryear - suggests that for many South Africans in the 21st century consciousness of racism derives from the oratory of politicians and the prominence given to racist behaviour in the media.
Mr Mbeki is wont to quote the African fighter and theoretician, Amilcar Cabral, when outlining the challenges ahead: "Tell no lies. Claim no easy victories." The aphorism applies aptly to any attempt to assess the state of racism in contemporary South Africa.
During the conference Irish Times writers around the world will assess the problem of racism in their countries. Tomorrow: Derek Scally on racism in Germany