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I've spent the last ten days in the High Veld filming. And I intended to write about South African World Cup fever.

Alas, with the exception of Visa's takeover of Jo'burg's OliverTambo international airport, there's no evidence of World Cup hype going into overdrive here quite yet.

Instead, I want to share with you an article in the Media and Marketing section of South Africa's biggest selling Saturday national newspaper, the Saturday Star, from columnist Ntsho ya Mathudi.

The piece took me by surprise because it highlights a still unreconstructed area of South Africa's racial divide - and by implication the UK's too.

Mathudi points to 'structural, systemic and entrenched' discrimination in the South African advertising industry.

Despite the fact that almost all agencies can declare themselves ‘black owned', there is here, according to Mathudi, a disconnect between those who own, control and disseminate brand values (in the main white South Africans) and the majority who live out the social values (mainly black South Africans).

If you are a black copywriter in South Africa, you are expected either to translate the ideas of white creatives into a black vernacular or give a black perspective for white creatives to factor in to their work.

Which means you're viewed pretty much as an expert in black issues and nothing else. The black creative's role becomes akin to a cultural interpreter for ideas created by whites.

As Mathudi says: "most black people have had the experience of being treated indifferently in a meeting until the conversation turns to the ‘emerging market' or whatever the phrase of choice to describe ‘these people'".

I have it on good authority that that's the main reason why black creatives are employed.

If there is a form of cultural apartheid still being practised in the South African agency world, it's also true of the UK advertising industry.

At a time when the BBC has green-lighted the broadcast of Nick Griffin's Aryan views under the guise of democratic legitimacy, when the BNP is catching the eye of an increasingly disaffected electorate, our advertising industry still presents a predominantly WASPish view of the world and, by default, propogates a form of white cultural imperialism.

And that's dangerous.

If you dismiss this as mythology, watch the next commercial break, the outdoor on your way home today, the next commercial break tonight or the ads in The Metro on your way in tomorrow. The tone and content is overwhelmingly WASP.

Just as here in South Africa, advertising is the last bastion of cultural elitism, so in the UK, the industry continues to marginalise Black and Ethnic groups through exclusion or a form of unrepresentative tokenism.

Which isn't  surprising.

After all, how many BEM creative directors can you name in direct or advertising agencies? Or at a brand marketing level client-side?

I've got to three.

There's a bigger issue here. Policy-makers get it, most areas of industry get it, most areas of the media get it.

But the last hold-out against true social representation is ours - brand owners, marketers, advertising and direct agencies. Highly visible communications that are absorbed unconsciously by the majority of the UK electorate every day.

In doing so, we're not just stoking up trouble for our industry, but for society as a whole - particularly as Nick Griffin has appropriated the word 'identity' to euphemistically disguise the word 'race'.

As identity specialists ourselves, we all have a responsibility to present the truth in advertising and communications.

And not play into the hands of those who seek to widen the racial divide.

With possibly the most divisive British General Election in recent history just six months away, let's all be vigilant.

Dan Douglass is executive creative director at Meteorite. He writes a monthly column for marketingdirectmag.co.uk and the DM Bulletin.