Another Zimbabwe?

First of two parts

BENONI, South Africa - Daan Duvenage shook his head as he gazed over the wood-and-tin shacks where 40,000 squatters have established homes on a 140-acre swath of his farm.

“I can’t go in there,” he said of the warren of homes, streets and shops where he once grew hay for his cattle. “Too dangerous for me. They know who I am.”

Mr. Duvenage, a white farmer, still holds legal title to the land but has been unable to get the government of President Thabo Mbeki to remove the squatters.

The Witwatersrand High Court ordered the removal of 6,000 squatters in April 2001, but the order was never enforced, and financially strapped local authorities want Mr. Duvenage personally to pay the estimated $262,000 cost of housing them elsewhere.

The Pretoria High Court again sided with Mr. Duvenage last month, but it remains to be seen whether anything will happen.

The farmer said he doesn’t mind seeing white-owned land redistributed to poor blacks as long as it is done legally and equitably. And he understands the government’s concerns about setting a precedent that will encourage more illegal land grabs.

But he also argues that the government must respect and enforce property rights or risk scaring off foreign investment in a nation where black unemployment is estimated to run as high as 50 percent.

The shantytown on his land is surprisingly well-kept, with wide dirt avenues, flower gardens and immaculately groomed lawns. Each shack is numbered to receive mail.

The government delivers water daily and set up voting stations during last month’s national elections, in which the camp voted about 90 percent for the ruling African National Congress.

One squatter, who refused to give his name, said he wished the government would act more aggressively to expropriate white-owned farms as has been done in neighboring Zimbabwe.

But Mr. Duvenage said he doesn’t think it will. “I don’t think they are as stupid as [Zimbabwe President Robert] Mugabe,” he said.

Other white South Africans fear he is wrong.

Mr. Mugabe, who came to power with the end of white rule in the former Rhodesia in 1980, initially promised that blacks and whites would live harmoniously in a “rainbow nation” and, in fact, respected white rights for two decades.

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