But there’s no sidelining this issue–not in southern Africa. In Zimbabwe, a two-year-old political crisis was back on the boil last week. Saturday was eviction day for 3,000 white farmers, though many still were fighting in court to stay or be paid for their property. Zimbabwe’s defiant president, Robert Mugabe, was headed for the Johannesburg summit, presumably to hold forth on how the farm seizures further the idea of “sustainable development.” In neighboring Namibia, President Sam Nujoma warned his country’s white ranchers that they risk the same fate if they don’t more readily offer their land for sale in a government redistribution plan. As South African officials watched the rand fall against the dollar, they could only whisper the words “It won’t happen here.” But South Africa’s government, led by the African National Congress Party, isn’t immune from the region’s growing disillusionment. Defensively, the ANC is working on new ways to give blacks a more equitable share of the country’s wealth.

The latest reports from Zimbabwe were a public-relations nightmare for the conference hosts, who have seen foreign investors scared away by the violent land grab next door. While Mugabe’s brutal tactics are widely deplored, many Africans are sympathetic to his basic grievance. Namibia faces similar pressures. Nujoma last week announced plans to expropriate 192 farms owned by absentee white landlords. “Although we enjoy peace and stability in this country, up to now more than 70 percent of our arable land is still in the hands of the minority white farmers,” he told a political convention. “The white landowners must know that the majority landless citizens of this country are daily becoming impatient.” Since independence in 1990, Namibia has bought 105 commercial farms and resettled about 30,000 people on them. But Nujoma’s cabinet reckons that the government would need to expand its budget for land redistribution nearly tenfold to meet the demands of a quarter million landless blacks. The government complains that the redistribution program is bogging down because whites want too much money for their land under the “willing buyer, willing seller” principle. Not surprisingly, the white farmers are worried. Said Jaap Jooste, a cattle farmer in Gobabis, “Every day I hear the president speak, I can’t help but think of Zimbabwe.”

The dynamics in South Africa are different, but just as sensitive. When apartheid fell in 1994, South African blacks inherited the continent’s most developed economy. Although more than 2 million blacks were moved off white-owned land under apartheid and whites still own 85 percent of the commercial farmland, South Africa depends heavily on its manufacturing sector for employment and income. Resentment over landlessness doesn’t burn as hotly as it would in a primarily agricultural country, but the anger festers nonetheless. President Thabo Mbeki has said that South Africa’s biggest problems are job creation and homelessness–and he’s pushed an ambitious home-building program. According to one recent poll, only 2 percent of South Africans see land as an unresolved problem. But since 1994, the government has redistributed about 1 million hectares of land to blacks and settled nearly 40,000 of 68,000 claims for restitution by people dispossessed under apartheid. The ruling ANC is a close cousin to Namibia’s and Zimbabwe’s ruling parties–an authoritarian structure with roots in the armed struggle. Analysts wonder if it will turn to white-baiting if an opposition party built on correcting the country’s economic inequities begins to grow.

The real message of Zimbabwe is not about land reform. It’s that the region’s fundamental deal–a black political takeover that left whites in control of the economy–has failed. The financial gulf between whites and blacks allowed Mugabe to launch a populist bid to cling to power, denouncing racism and British colonialism. Zimbabwe has shown the danger of indefinitely postponing the payoff promised in the country’s peaceful transition to majority rule. Mugabe’s radicalism represents a political contagion that could spread throughout the region.

The ANC clearly wants to step up the pace of its “empowerment” effort–driven mainly by government-procurement policies that favor black-owned firms. The shares of companies owned by “historically disadvantaged individuals” represent only 2 percent of the Johannesburg Stock Exchange’s market capitalization. One big move has been new draft legislation on mineral rights that would give the state ownership of mining land. Mining firms–traditional pillars of the economy–would bid for leases based on plans that include pledges of assistance to blacks. Some white business leaders are outraged; the CEO of one mining firm called it “the South African equivalent of Robert Mugabe’s land grab.”

For now this brewing financial fight is worlds away from the Johannesburg street protest. But the resentments underlying both are similar. “The government is moving too slowly,” said Dorcas Molefi, 42, a jobless land protester. “I still support it, but if our conditions don’t improve in the next five years, the ANC will no longer get my vote.” Southern Africa’s leaders will ignore voices like hers at their peril.