Angry and unyielding, a white farmer digs in

One of a few hundred white farmers left in Zimbabwe, Campbell is resisting the government's final push to evict the last of them. A sunburned, feisty fellow of 73 who glares out at the world from under the wide brim of an old felt hat, he believes that ownership is defended by never giving up.

Every last mango, every orange and every potato on his 3,000-acre farm must be fiercely guarded, with guns if need be -- 12 guards patrol the farm. Whenever a radio call from his security outfit comes in at night, he grabs his pistol and drives out into the dark.

He sleeps with his front door wide open, as if to show he's afraid of no one, the dogs scampering in and out of the night at a whim. But he's enough of a realist to hide the one thing he cannot bear to lose if the government does take away his farm: his photographs.

Nothing in Zimbabwe is as bitterly contested as land. It arouses the tangled resentments and prejudices going back to colonization, a bitterness that has only hardened after nearly 30 years of independence from the British. There are blacks who see whites as foreigners who have no right to the land. There are whites who think blacks don't make good farmers or that they have no feelings for animals or trees.

The regime of President Robert Mugabe has gone further than most African governments in systematically unraveling the colonial pattern of land ownership.

But the cost to the country has been enormous. It transformed Zimbabwe from a modern agricultural economy that exported food across southern Africa into a country of subsistence farming, leaving millions on the brink of starvation.

"If you are going back to small-scale pre-colonial traditional farming, you are subjecting yourself to the same constraints that those people suffered from, that kept the population of this country at a few hundred thousand for thousands of years. The country has become poorer because of what's happened, much, much poorer," said John Robertson, an independent economist in Harare, the capital.

Zimbabwe's land reform began after independence on a willing-seller, willing-buyer basis. Britain initially helped its former colony with the program. But in 1992, the Zimbabwean government enacted legislation enabling it to seize land in return for compensation. Britain stopped its funding in 1997, demanding greater transparency and proof that land reform would benefit the poor and not hinder investment.

In 2000 Mugabe, blaming the British for reneging on the funding deal, encouraged war veterans and others to invade white farmers' land, and farms were seized without payment.

Mugabe has handed out the land to cronies in a system of patronage reminiscent of a traditional chief, Robertson said.

"The government was dispossessing people of land rights so that they could allocate land and restore what was essentially a patronage system, distributing the best land to the most loyal supporters," he said. "Individuals have no ownership rights and can be dispossessed at the first sign of disloyalty."

The man planning to move into Campbell's stately farm homestead is one of the country's big men, Nathan Shamuyarira, official spokesman for the ruling ZANU-PF party.

On the brink of losing everything, Campbell is unafraid of giving offense. He is quick to anger and is not exactly politically correct. He relates with some satisfaction that, though he opposed apartheid in his youth as a military officer in South Africa, where he was born, he soon changed his mind.

If someone in Hollywood stumbled upon Campbell's story and decided to script him as a rough diamond making a heroic last stand, it would be tough going to find that sentimental silver lining. He's like an ancient tortoise who determinedly keeps his soft side hidden.

In rural Zimbabwe, with black farmers living beside white landowners such as Campbell, tension is ever-present.

Driving in his pickup past the cotton crop planted by black farmers, Campbell gives a contemptuous bark of laughter.

"Pathetic!" he snorts at the straggly plants on what used to be Carskey Farm, owned by his son Bruce until it was invaded in 2002 by ZANU-PF youths. The farm was divided among more than 50 black families. "They're producing nothing," Campbell said. "With that many people on the land, it doesn't work."

The bitterness runs both ways: Many white farmers lost everything, the toil of a lifetime, without compensation. Even the white social networks are frayed, with whispered gossip about those seen as "yes men" and collaborators who pay off local ZANU-PF officials, to keep trouble away.