ONGOMBO WEST FARM, Namibia - It started as a minor dispute between farm worker and farm owner, a bit of unpleasantness that might have been smoothed over with a few mild words. The 68-year-old owner, Hilde Wiese, discovered a gosling crushed between crates in the flower garden. She scolded the gardener for her carelessness. The worker, resentful, shouted at the owner's son, Andreas.
None of them could have guessed how their argument would play out. Fourteen months later, the Namibian government is expropriating the farm where the Wiese family has lived for four generations. The president has publicly declared Andreas Wiese a criminal. The farm workers union, which mobilized hundreds of protesters outside the Wieses' gate, has warned that a similar fate awaits other farmers who mistreat their workers.
That a seemingly routine dispute can suddenly explode into a showdown between the races underscores the fragility of white land holdings here -- and the powder keg that long suppressed tensions over land in southern Africa threaten to become. Neighboring Zimbabwe, where the government has seized farms from thousands of white commercial farmers, has demonstrated how extreme measures can plunge a country into economic ruin, racial violence and widespread suffering.
Yet no other African nation has shown a better way than Zimbabwe's for resolving the blatant land disparities created by a century of colonialism and white minority rule. How Namibia manages its land conflict, now erupting on farms like the Wieses' after a decade of uneasy peace, has ramifications for the region.
In February, with the farm workers union threatening to invade 15 farms, Namibia's leaders announced they would speed up a decade of agonizingly slow land reform by expropriating white-owned farms. Ten farms, including the Wiese farm, have been marked for expropriation so far. Unlike Zimbabwe, Namibia promises to compensate the owners, though it scarcely has the money.
The more assertive steps arise from a simple fact: although blacks in Namibia were promised in 1990 that independence would mean land redistribution on a grand scale, it has not. Blacks here have gained an average of just 1 percent of commercial farmland a year. In Namibia, an arid nation of 1.9 million people, roughly 4,000 white farmers still own roughly half of the usable farmland, while some 800,000 black farmers are jammed into the other half. The division reflects a century of labors first by Germany, then by white-ruled South Africa, to drive blacks into restricted areas and resettle their land with white farmers, most of them cattle ranchers.
Hifikepunye Pohamba, the Namibian lands minister who was elected last month as the nation's second president, says Namibia's stability rests in part upon changing that equation.
"For how long are we going to be able to convince these people not to take the law into their own hands?" he asked in an interview just before voters picked him to succeed the current president, Samuel Nujoma, next March. "The law is implemented by police, and the police we have are from disadvantaged groups. They are human. They also want to have the land. If you ask them to address the situation, they will not say no but they will not go.
"That is the situation I personally fear."
He has reason enough. The Namibian Farm Workers Union, which claims about 4,000 members, is increasingly militant. Although the union has so far limited itself to protests and threats, its message to white farmers is ominous: those who refuse to rehire unjustly fired workers will face land invasions.
"We would not hurt anybody unless they invite a war," said Samson Amupanda, the union's national organizer. "But we will go ahead and take the farm and give it to the workers. We will take the law into our own hands because we have a right to do so."
Mr. Pohamba's government resorted to expropriation after milder measures failed. The government transferred roughly 700 farms into the hands of blacks by offering them low-cost loans to buy farmland on the open market. That has created a tiny core of black commercial farmers.
But the government's efforts to buy white-owned farms and resettle poor black farmers on them with 99-year leases have made little headway. Since 1995, it has bought just 137 farms and moved in only about 1,000 families. Another 243,000 people remain on the waiting list.
Mr. Pohamba places blame for the government's poor results on the unwillingness of white farmers to part with tracts of land blessed with water and infrastructure. Independent analysts say the state bureaucracy also proved an inefficient buyer.
Titus Mbuere, 70, is one of the lucky few to be given land. A former teacher, he said he roamed the communal lands of eastern Namibia for years, searching for enough grass and water for his cows. Then in April 2002, apparently because his wife is disabled, he vaulted to the top of the list of applicants for farms.
Now, his new white concrete home overlooks his vast tract of 2,821 rolling acres east of the capital, Windhoek. His water tank is full. A vegetable garden is planned.
He can scarcely believe his luck. "I should have been 50 or 60 years old for this," he said as his two grandchildren settled at his feet on the porch. "But I like this very much.
"I don't have to share it with anybody. Thank you very much to the government."
Neighbors say Mr. Mbuere's new farm is part of a 27,000-acre tract that the government acquired from one of Namibia's biggest cattle farmers and businessmen.
Mr. Mbuere has only 40 cows and little hope of marketing cattle. But at this point, Namibia's leaders are less concerned about the economic consequences of replacing commercial farmers with subsistence farmers, so long as black farmers end up with more land.
With expropriation, the government need no longer wait for willing sellers. But it must still pay for the farms, and financing remains a major roadblock. The government has pledged to redistribute about 23 million acres. Analysts say that amounts to about 2,000 farms, or less than one-third of the commercial farmland now in white hands.
Namibia's current budget for land reform -- more than double last year's -- is a paltry $8 million. At that rate, outside experts predict, it will take the government 12 to 20 years to reach its goal.
Mr. Pohamba complains that Germany and other European countries have rebuffed requests for donations -- he suspects because European taxpayers do not want to pay to take land from Namibians of German extraction. A spokesman for the German Embassy in Windhoek said Germany was contributing $10.4 million for technical assistance and other measures to support land reform but no money for land acquisition.
Like many Namibians, Andreas Wiese, 33, said he accepted that Namibia's land must be more fairly divided. What he objects to, he said in an interview in his 97-year-old peach-colored farmhouse, is the selective seizure of farms to score political points.
Six months after the government mailed him an expropriation notice, he said, he still can't understand how a dead gosling escalated into a controversy that is costing him his great-grandfather's farm.
As Mr. Wiese tells it, after the argument with the gardener, one worker threatened him with a knife and then walked off the job with five others. Mr. Wiese fired them and evicted them and their families from the housing he provides for his laborers.
Mr. Amupanda, the union organizer, said Mr. Wiese refused to negotiate about reinstating the workers, forcing the homeless families to camp out in a dry riverbed. Later, Mr. Wiese reinstated the workers under court order, but the dispute continued. The union complained that he refused to let the workers return to their homes; Mr. Wiese said they refused to move back.
In May, President Nujoma condemned Mr. Wiese in a speech. "We don't accept the white of Ongombo West," he said, naming the Wiese farm and wagging his finger. "He is a criminal, and we are going to deal with him."
Mr. Pohamba refrains from singling out individuals. But he said the government was particularly interested in expropriating the farms of landowners who show no concern for their workers -- a policy that white farmers say turns expropriation into punishment.
"If you aren't already a racist, they make you a racist," Mr. Wiese said bitterly. He once exported 100,000 flowers a year and had planned to expand with foreign investors, he said. Now his operation is at a virtual standstill.
"Everything will be destroyed," his mother said. "Just give them two years, and everything will be gone."
On a hillside less than an hour's drive from the Wiese farm stands another peach-colored house, so new that bags of concrete are still stacked against its porch. As the Wieses contemplate the end to their way of life, Justine Kamukuenjandje is starting anew at the age of 54.
"This is our ancestors' land," said Zebetheus Kaupuzo, her 40-year old nephew who is caring for the family's 75 cows and 124 goats. But he and his aunt both say they hope for a peaceful, lawful redistribution of it.
"I don't want to cause that trouble like they had in Zimbabwe," Mr. Kaupuzo said. "The economy will go down.
"The whites have so much land," he continued, as two workers dug for a vegetable garden. "They should share it. We will just work together."