One of my favorite things about reporting in Africa is riding around on the back of motorcycle taxis. These cheap transport machines are great for dodging traffic jams in many of Africa's congested cities – and potholes on its rural roads.

The hired motorbikes have different names in different places. In Kampala, Uganda, they're called "Boda-bodas" – apparently because they were originally used to transport people across a no-man's-land between border posts on the Kenya-Uganda border.

On my recent trip to Bunia (see latest story), in eastern Congo, "motos" were pretty much the only way to get around – unless you could hitch a ride with UN peacekeepers on their armored-personnel carriers (APCs), as I did one night. (Click on one of the following links below to see a video clip of an APC rolling through Bunia during voter registration for Congo's upcoming elections: Quicktime | Real Player | Windows Media.)

But the best thing about the motorcycle taxis is they give you a 20-m.p.h., street-level view.

Driving into Bunia for the first time, I could see it was a lot more prosperous than it had been two years ago, when militia members were roaming the streets, terrorizing civilians. There's even a new DHL delivery office -- and two competing cellphone companies, Celtel and Vodacom. There's also the newly painted post office. Mail hasn't been delivered here for a few years because of the 1998-2003 war. But the election commission took over the post office recently – and helped refurbish it.

Puttering past the sprawling refugee camp on Bunia's outskirts, I saw a one-room structure with reed walls and roof. A hand-lettered sign said, "Salon de Coiffure." Even refugees have to get their hair done somewhere. In this case, it was under the watchful eyes of UN peacekeepers, who were sandbagged in behind machine guns.

Motorcycle-taxi riding there is not without its perils, however. At one point we almost got run off the road by a herd of cattle. (Click on one of the following links below to see a video clip using Quicktime, Real Player, or Windows Media.)

Correspondent - Stephanie Hanes

In our part of South Africa, most of the earth is brown these days, baked by an unceasing winter sun.

That dryness whizzed by as I drove from my home in Johannesburg to Thabazimbi, a small farming town about three hours northwest: Scrubby, earth-toned hills and gray-golden fields; red dust kicked up by trucks spitting black exhaust.

Every now and then, a splash of green would break the landscape, so bright that it almost shimmered neon. Those were the fields with water, owned by farmers with the state-of-the-art irrigation systems that force unforgiving South African soil into fertility.

I was driving to visit a "farm school," a public school on private farmland. These schools were built during apartheid by white farmers for the children of their low-paid black workers, and I was writing for the Monitor about the challenge of modernizing them in the new South Africa. (See story).

But as I tried to interview people for the story, the conversation often shifted away from children and education to the rugged, rich land that flew by my window.

To some, the well-tended soil is a constant reminder of how whites still control too much in this country 11 years after the official end of apartheid.

Others, mainly whites, fear the land is too valuable to be safe. They are sure the black government will steal it.

I got my first glimpse of the raw emotions surrounding land here during an interview with an Afrikaner farmer. (Afrikaners, the descendants of long-ago Dutch settlers, were the greatest proponents of apartheid.)

When I asked him about farmers' responsibility to improve decrepit schools on their land, he lashed out against the current South African government. Crumbling walls and unsanitary conditions? Those were simply excuses by the black-led government to steal sections of land, he said.

"Just look at Zimbabwe," he said grimly, evoking the local white nightmare. In that neighboring country, violent takeovers of white-owned farms helped bring on a chaos that is still raging.

Leaving the school children far behind in conversation, the farmer launched into a oft-repeated history lesson about how Afrikaners arrived in South Africa around the same time as the ancestors of the black population.

He never addressed the more recent history, when the apartheid government forced blacks off their land and prohibited them from buying property. Nor did he talk about the cheap black labor that helps make white-owned farms so bountiful.

This latter history consumes the land rights activists. Many of the farmers are unrepentant racists, they told me, and will never allow any black empowerment program. This is why they say land transfers need to happen now.

The calmest people I met while reporting were at the Thabazimbi school. The soft-spoken principal, Peter Mosito, did not offer any opinions on land reform. Instead, he spoke of how he has nurtured this primary school for decades, about his love for teaching, about the proud children who walk kilometers to get to class.

He was obviously bothered by disputes between his school and the farmer who owns the land upon which it sits. As the principal watched his students walk through the red dust into modular classrooms – the old school building had burned in a suspicious fire – he admitted quietly that he felt more persecuted than he did under apartheid. 

A young girl lowered her voice when asked about the farmer.

"He doesn't really like people," she said. "I mean, black people. He won't let us touch his fence."

She looked away.

I drove back to Johannesburg that day past the brown mountains and green fields, past the rainbows that form in the mist of irrigation equipment. But I was focused on the students, how they laughed and scampered like all pre-teens do, how they waved and grinned when I pulled my car out of their red dust school yard. I thought of how they are absorbing the bitter emotions that are part of the public debate about their school.

Maybe their future is tied to the fate of land ownership. But I wished that their future – and what they are learning now – sparked as much public emotion as concerns about the land.