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.