Regional Outlook : Stability Spreading in Southern Africa : Peaceful elections in Namibia and Mozambique are latest evidence that democracy is catching on.

An utterly peaceful two-day election in Namibia last week capped a year of astonishing democratic and economic gains in southern Africa, a long-blighted region that now offers dramatic hope for a crippled continent.

In Namibia’s first post-independence election, the incumbent president, Sam Nujoma, and his ruling party, the South-West Africa People’s Organization, or SWAPO, swept nearly 72% of the vote in the former South African colony, a sparsely populated nation twice the size of California.

“We are fighters,” announced Nujoma, a former guerrilla leader. But the new enemies “are poverty, hunger, disease and ignorance.”

Bullets, not ballots, are usually associated with a continent dominated by numbing news of famine, brutal ethnic wars, disabling corruption, the anarchy of Zaire and Somalia, and the genocidal horrors of Rwanda. The continental economic slide has been so severe that most Africans are poorer today than they were in the mid-1970s, according to the World Bank.

But the successful election in Namibia added to evidence that political reconciliation and multi-party democracy are inexorably spreading over the vast southern third of Africa after decades of bitter racial strife and a series of devastating wars fueled by Cold War rivalries.

One after another, nine of the 10 nations in southern Africa have held elections since 1991, including three for the first time this year. Only the tiny mountain kingdom of Swaziland has resisted the rush of democratic reform.

To be sure, poverty is still the rule, and some governments barely tolerate their opposition. But hope is growing that southern Africa, a region of more than 100 million people, can become a model of stability and an economic powerhouse that may help reverse the grim trends farther north on the continent.

The process already has started. A trading bloc is under consideration to boost regional economies. And the elected leaders of South Africa, Zimbabwe and Botswana have met repeatedly to orchestrate diplomatic pressure that restored a democratic government in tiny Lesotho, kept elections on track in Mozambique and has sought a lasting peace in Angola.

But Eugene Nyati, director of the Center for African Studies in Johannesburg, cautions that “it’s too early to celebrate.”

“The democratic elections you’ve seen are a rejection of one-party dictatorships, but most fall far short of embracing the multi-party democratic culture as known in the West,” he said.

Most African democracies remain too dependent on foreign aid, Nyati pointed out, and are hobbled by economic disparities and ethnic divisions. They could collapse “like a house of cards,” he warned. “Until they can translate the new democracy into economic well-being, the democracies will be short-lived. The process remains very vulnerable.”

Angola remains the region’s biggest worry. After two previous peace accords and one election ended in failure, a truce and peace agreement signed Nov. 20 to end Angola’s 19-year civil war has yet to silence the guns in the region’s last remaining and most intractable conflict.

But United Nations officials, who are monitoring the cease-fire, insist that sporadic battles between the elected government of President Jose Eduardo dos Santos and the rebel UNITA army led by Jonas Savimbi have not scuttled the ambitious plans to create a unified military and a government based on power-sharing.

Savimbi, who has not appeared in public in months, didn’t show up to sign the treaty in the Zambian capital of Lusaka.

But aides have signaled that the enigmatic rebel leader has endorsed the agreement, and a UNITA delegation last week joined the first meeting of the joint military and political commission that will oversee implementation of the accord.

As a result, once doubtful U.N. officials and diplomats are increasingly optimistic that peace, and perhaps one day even prosperity, may finally be possible in a country potentially rich with diamonds and oil.

Peace has already broken out in Mozambique, another bloody spot on the map. Two years after a U.N.-brokered cease-fire ended one of Africa’s longest and most savage wars, the world’s poorest country (annual per capita income is only $60) successfully held its first free elections in late October.

As expected, the incumbent ruler, Joaquim Chissano, was elected president. More important, his chief rival, former rebel chief Afonso Dhlakama, has kept his pledge to honor the results rather than resume a 17-year war marked by conscription of children, widespread atrocities and scorched-earth tactics.

“This specter of war has been removed,” Chissano said Friday in his inauguration speech in Maputo. “Peace has come to stay.”

But, for now, Mozambique remains a ward of the United Nations and major Western donors. The outside world has spent $1 billion monitoring the cease-fire, demobilizing combatants, repatriating refugees and registering voters. Chaos could resume when the United Nations’ 7,000 peacekeepers withdraw early next year.

Africa’s most extraordinary transition, of course, came with the stirring election in April of Nelson Mandela as president of a democratic South Africa after 3 1/2 centuries of institutionalized racial oppression, first under colonialism and then under apartheid.

Mandela’s triumphant inauguration was soon followed by the ouster of Africa’s longest-serving despot, Malawi’s frail and apparently senile H. Kamuzu Banda, in that nation’s first-ever democratic election.

During his three decades of ruthless if eccentric rule, Banda proclaimed himself Life President and outlawed all political opposition, as well as long hair on men, bell-bottomed pants and miniskirts. He jailed potential rivals and warned others that they would be “food for the crocodiles.”

A new constitution has since abolished scores of repressive laws. The new president, former businessman Bakili Muluzi, has vowed to alleviate poverty and boost social services. “We will not work on retribution,” he said at his first news conference.

Next came Botswana, the region’s oldest and most stable democracy. The diamond-rich nation held its sixth general election without fanfare Oct. 15. Angered at corruption scandals and rising unemployment, voters trimmed the majority of the long-ruling Botswana Democratic Party.

One of the world’s poorest nations when it won independence from Britain in 1966, Botswana has since blossomed into one of Africa’s richest. Primary and high school enrollment has grown exponentially, tarred roads crisscross the country, and health standards are vastly improved.

Neighboring Zimbabwe, led by President Robert Mugabe since a guerrilla war ended the white regime of Rhodesia in 1980, is due to hold elections next year. Racial tensions have risen recently, fueled by accusations that whites, who are outnumbered 100 to 1, still dominate the economy and own most of the arable land.

Zambia’s leader since independence in 1964, Kenneth Kaunda, stepped down in 1991 after he was finally forced to hold an election. He hopes for a comeback in new polls next year.

Not surprisingly, the new South Africa, the region’s richest and most developed nation, remains the paradigm and the leader for the fledgling democracies.

Racially and politically polarized, it used a power-sharing arrangement to usher in democracy. That drew nearly every political party into the April election and ultimately gave each of them a role in the new government of national unity.

And Mandela, often to the dismay of his most ardent supporters, has reached out to reassure nervous whites at home and investors abroad. He has neither cut the civil service, confiscated land nor nationalized industries. He has won strong backing from the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.

Indeed, Mandela’s government now plans to privatize such state-owned companies as Eskom, which generates half the electricity produced in sub-Saharan Africa, to help finance its ambitious five-year reconstruction and development programs.

But even Mandela recognizes the limits of democracy. Touring the squalid squatters camp of Orange Farm outside Johannesburg on Thursday, the president conceded that he had yet to deliver the jobs, houses, electricity and other tangible benefits he often promised during the campaign.

“I have brought none of these things,” he told the crowd, adding: “The wheels of government grind very slowly, and people should not expect miracles. We are ordinary human beings with many limitations.”