White Farmers Migrate Deeper Within Southern Africa : Trek: Dozens scouting countries they once saw as all wrong: Mozambique, Uganda, Zaire, Zambia, Malawi.

The average white South African farmer used to view the rest of the continent as a nightmarish mixture of Idi Amin, famine, corruption and massacres.

Now, some seek greener pastures there.

In a migration evoking the Great Trek made by their Boer ancestors, dozens of farmers are scouting out countries they once saw as all that was wrong with black-ruled Africa: Mozambique (Marxist), Uganda (savagery), Zaire (corruption), Zambia (mismanagement), Malawi (dictatorship).

Reformers now run most of those countries, and black rule elsewhere seems less threatening a year after President Nelson Mandela came to power in South Africa. Most farmers credit Mandela with a good job, even if he talks of a land tax the white-minority regime would never have dared impose on its rural bedrock.

“This isn’t about politics,” said farmer Hans Herbst. “If it was that, everybody would leave. It’s about drought. It’s mainly the people from the dry areas going.”

Neither white nor black governments can control the 15-year drought that has burned once-rich soil to dust and dried up farm income in the Orange Free State and Transvaal. Officials predict 3,000 South African farmers will go out of business in the next few years.

Herbst, 60, is one. A trophy case at his farmhouse near Roedtan, a flyspeck town deep in the Transvaal heartland, attests to his skill as a rancher. But his spread of 3,700 acres supports only 350 head of beef cattle--about one-10th of the herd that a similar-size farm in California could handle.

As his cows cluster at wells tapping an ever-dropping water table, Herbst thinks of the lush green fields of Uganda, a land of heavy rainfall bordering the bounteous waters of Lake Victoria. He is the point man for 17 farmers interested in settling there if the right deal can be struck.

“They’ve got that Idi Amin story sorted out,” Herbst said, referring to the 1970s dictator who killed tens of thousands of Ugandans. “They’ve got very good infrastructure. And there’s no friendlier people on Earth.”

Uganda and half a dozen other nations are negotiating with the South African government and farm associations to woo settlers. The farmers want cheap, well-watered land and guarantees for export markets; the host countries hope to increase food output by learning from the South Africans’ modern techniques. Officials involved believe some agreements can be reached by June.

“They only want South African farmers,” said Dries Bruwer, president of the Transvaal Agricultural Union. “They say, ‘You know Africa, how to farm in Africa, and how to work with the people in Africa.’ ”

Black countries long viewed the white Afrikaner farmer, or Boer, as the personification of apartheid. And despite the end of South Africa’s long isolation with Mandela’s election, white intentions remain suspect.

Mozambique and Uganda do not want white settlers to cluster together, fearing they might later claim a white enclave. Zaire’s opposition fears whites could prop up dictator Mobutu Sese Seko.

But Herbst considers himself an African farmer first and foremost, and South Africans traveling to the rest of the continent now that anti-apartheid sanctions are gone express surprise at the warm welcome they usually receive.

“They are the white tribe of Africa,” said Muwfagy D. Jeichande, Mozambique’s ambassador to South Africa. “I think the more they interact with other Africans, they’ll realize they are welcomed in Africa.”

Mandela hopes the emigres can enrich South Africa’s poor neighbors and stem a tide of illegal immigrants seeking jobs. He signed an agreement with Mozambique in February that envisages the settlement of 1,000 South African farmers there.

That many farmers may be talking about Mozambique, but only a fraction are likely to go. Hundreds of thousands of land mines from Mozambique’s long civil war litter the countryside, electricity in rural areas comes only from generators, and only four-wheel-drives can navigate the poor roads.

The practical-minded more likely will go where they can most quickly find the greatest profits, probably from exports to the rest of Africa and Europe. Zaire, where crops routinely rot for lack of transport, would attract few. Uganda’s four crop cycles a year might do better.

Migration into unknown lands evokes a touchstone of the Afrikaner past--the 19th-Century Great Trek of thousands of Boer families from British rule in the Cape to the wilderness of the Transvaal and Orange Free State. The trek mirrored the westward movement of the American pioneers who opened the West.

But it also forged the siege mentality that characterized the racist rule of apartheid. The settlers whose muskets defeated huge black tribes like the Zulus constantly feared being overrun.

Those fears remain evident among right-wingers who vocally oppose the “little trek” as a plot by Mandela’s African National Congress to divide and weaken Afrikaners.

“It sounds romantic in the beginning, but it will end up in a disaster,” said Eugene TerreBlanche, leader of the extremist Afrikaner Resistance Movement.

Farmers staking their children’s futures on migration hope to avoid disaster by going only to countries with which the South African government signs enforceable international agreements.

They want to ensure Afrikaans-language education for their children, possibly via computer linkups, and to live close enough to each other to share a church.

“I think we can find ways of protecting them as well as us,” said Charles Wagaba of the Uganda High Commission. “If they go and do not show prejudice, I think that they should be well accepted.”