If you let him stay free, on condition that he works, he won't do anything They're lazy you know. "You can have him," one potential landlady informed me during my hunt for a home, flicking her thumb towards a hovel at the bottom of the garden. "If you don't want him we'll evict him."She was referring to the elderly live-in black gardener whom the previous tenants had "generously" kept on "But you have to be careful," she warned "Charge him rent and then pay it back when he works That's what the neighbour does. And in South Africa racism hardly needs shoring up.Newcomers are given liberal advice about how to handle "these bleks" and the level of white disdain can be breathtaking. The victims are people they know, attacked in neighbourhoods in which they live, and visit.It might be tempting to see this post-apartheid crime wave as racial revenge, except that no grouping escapes. What it does though is reinforce ingrained racism because perpetrators are invariably black. Now that freedom has been won, it is said that endemic violence has ebbed from politics only to resurface in civil crime statistics.

Whites, the theory goes, are only experiencing what township blacks have put up with for years and despite the media attention to their plight, blacks are still far more likely to be victims.What is certain is that for whites social change has removed the remoteness of murder, rape, assault and robbery. The popular theory is that violence had long since been a way of life. The state murdered, maimed and tortured to maintain the status quo and brutalised an entire township generation. Comparisons of crime statistics with those of previous years are pretty pointless. Under apartheid few blacks reported crimes, so remote was the chance of the police recording them, let alone taking action. Fans of the new enclosures claim that once the barricades are up and the guards in place they will knock down the walls surrounding individual properties so that children can play safely and neighbours can chat in the street. In the middle of the attack, their neighbour appeared and started shooting at the robbers.

The couple, who had cheered the ANC at the elections but were dismayed by the lawlessness that has since engulfed the country, had been planning to leave South Africa.In the affluent white suburbs north of Melville, they are building walls around entire neighbourhoods, patrolled 24 hours by armed security guards and Alsatian dogs. Their critics envisage a far more terrifying scenario: a mosaic of isolated camps that will reinforce South Africa's social fragmentation and prompt sniggers at the notion of a "rainbow nation", in which races and creeds co-exist peaceably.It is impossible to say if South Africa was always this brutal. While she fumbled for her bag her teenage assailants shot into the vehicle while her three children cowered in the back."When we got home we just cried and cried," she says. "Then I said we must pray for our attackers because they were only children - perhaps 16 or 17."Among those who sympathised with her ordeal was Jutta Ellmer.

A few days later Mrs Ellmer and her two children witnessed her husband Erich, a German business executive, being murdered in the family driveway by two car thieves. Last weekend, a quarter of a mile from our street, an elderly man was murdered by car thieves. Two weeks ago a colleague was held up at gunpoint when she stopped to fill up at a petrol station. But in every house, in every street, all of the windows and doors are gridded with iron. Warning signs, with gun motifs, are plastered on their outside walls, promising an armed response to housebreakers People live as if under siege. All I know of the family next door is the barking of watchdogs and the low nocturnal hum of their electric security fence, which rattled me at first but now lulls me to sleep.If any country deserves a happy ending it is South Africa but two years after the election of President Mandela all that was fought for so hard is jeopardised by crime It is the level of violent crime which is truly exceptional.