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The conflict comes a time when Zimbabweans face a heavy decision about the future of their nation: whether or not to reject the leader who gave them their independence, but who also, many say, has been a party to its degradation.

Reuben Gwatidzo doesn't look like a man who bears grudges. When I greet him in an elevator downtown, he is wearing a dark suit and silk tie and carrying a briefcase. The vice chairman of this capital's chamber of commerce, he has just come from a meeting about opening up Zimbabwe's telecommunications.

But within a few minutes, standing on the landing, we are deep in a discussion about Zimbabwe's powder-keg politics. That's when he tells me his grandparents -- still alive, and nearly 100 -- had taught him, from when he was small, the key tale of the Gwatidzo family: how they lost their land.

Sometime during the 1920's, they had said, a group of white men, working for the government of the then-British colony of Southern Rhodesia, arrived at the gate of the couple's farm. They packed all the couple's belongings and moved them out to a scrap of land that was a lot less fertile. They were barred from returning, and never quite recovered. "They still have very vivid memories" of that day, Gwatidzo says.

In Zimbabwe, land has transformed every life. Acres, not dollars, have long been the real measure of a person's wealth.

Since the farm invasions began this year, about 12 people -- including two white farmers -- have been killed. Almost all of the dead were known supporters of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change, which is trying to oust President Robert Mugabe in elections that are to be held sometime before August.

The current violence threatens to topple Zimbabwe into anarchy and economic collapse. Three cabinet ministers flew to London Thursday to press British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook to buy white land to redistribute among millions of landless blacks. It is a hugely expensive plan, but it would not be the first time the British government loaned millions for land repatriation in Zimbabwe. Prime Minister Tony Blair's government is alarmed enough to consider loaning about $57 million, on condition that Mugabe runs a clean election and evicts the invaders. Right now, that seems about as likely as snowfall on this steaming countryside.

Exactly 20 years after Mugabe's guerrillas finally routed the whites from power, millions of blacks are now unemployed and desperate for money. Added to that, Zimbabwe now has one of the world's highest AIDS infection rates: about one in four adults, further crippling the economy. Meanwhile, whites -- less than 1 percent of Zimbabweans -- own at least 40 percent of the productive farmland, and earn almost the entire commercial agricultural revenues.

With incredible cunning, Mugabe has managed to deflect the anger of millions of blacks, conveniently placing it squarely with the tiny minority. But observers say the leader clearly shares the blame for his country's sad state. Early on in his presidency, Mugabe gave hundreds of farms to close associates and party faithfuls, who knew almost nothing about agriculture. From there, inefficiency, cronyism and simple intransigence has kept the status quo in place.

In all this melee, what's been drowned out is a sense of how blacks lost their land in the first place.

Through decades of white rule, millions of blacks were stripped of their farmland, mostly without compensation. Now, many of their children and grandchildren earn minimum wages working on the large white farms, while others are eking out precarious livings in the cities. Some, like Gwatidzo, 36, have made it good. But that's rare.

When I ask an ex-guerrilla near Harare what the violence is all about, he shouts at me: "We went to war for land. What did they think we wanted? A country in the air?" "They" are the whites, not Mugabe's officials.

Next page | "Even if there were land for us, we have no money to buy it"