On manicured private school grounds, white boys dressed in white play cricket, a gentleman's game meant to instill a sense of fair play.
The sport and its traditions are a link to the Old World and the old ways. It is a hand-me-down from colonialism and white rule, a genteel reminder of the days when whites built themselves a paradise in Africa.With gun and law, whites disenfranchised blacks, took the continent's riches and prospered on the toil of poorly paid black workers and miners.
Now, a generation after Africa's great rush to independence, paradise is far less certain.
Many whites contributed greatly to Africa's development, spreading literacy, medical knowledge and technical skills. But those who stayed on wonder if they have a future in Africa, or more precisely, if their children do.
"I think as far as my generation is concerned, we are here to the bitter end," said David Irvine, who inherited a 15-acre chicken farm and built it into a 10,000-acre agricultural empire outside Harare, Zimbabwe's capital.
"We have a high standard of living, a good life," Irvine added. "Certainly I see a future for us here. Whether my son will be here in 30 or 40 years, I don't know."
Formerly white-ruled Rhodesia, Zimbabwe gained independence in 1980 after a seven-year bush war that ended with about 170,000 whites fleeing. That leaves about 100,000 whites in a country of 10.5 million people, still enough to wield influence.
A key issue now is that while whites no longer rule any country in sub-Saharan Africa, they keep a firm grip on much of Africa's wealth, ensconced inside their gleaming office towers and behind the high walls of comfortable homes.
Today many black Africans find liberation a hollow promise without economic power.
Questions about who has money, who doesn't and who is to blame are stoking age-old fires of racial tension, resentment and hate.
"It seems the white man is saying that the blacks should always feed from the white man's plate," said Phillip Chiyangwa, head of Africa Action Group, a militant black empowerment organization that sometimes resorts to threats of violence against whites in Zimbabwe.
Africa, he argues, is a black continent, a place where blacks deserve not just a piece of the pie, but the lion's share.
"Whites are as welcome as any other people as long as they realize they are in somebody else's country," Chiyangwa said.
Whites whose families have lived in Africa for generations, some since the 1650s, bristle at that kind of talk.
"We are a little anxious when the government refers to indigenous as meaning only black people," said Nick Swanepoel, the white president of the Commercial Farmers Union in Zimbabwe. "After independence, massive amounts of whites left the country. Those who stayed generally had the country at heart."
Whites came to Africa from all over the globe, but during the heyday of settlement and colonialism they arrived chiefly from England, France, Belgium, Portugal, Germany and the Netherlands.
The colonial powers divvied up Africa and imposed their own languages, customs and architecture. Ties to the Old World are still strong.
The most common criticism of white Africans is they live like expatriates in their own countries.
"That feeling of being part of a nation just isn't there," said Danny Meyer, the white president of the Zimbabwe National Chamber of Commerce.
Most African whites live in exclusive white suburbs, join posh private clubs and go to private schools and hospitals. They depend on black workers to help them make money and clean their homes, while the black population needs the jobs offered by white businessmen.
Most blacks regard white Africans as a "necessary nuisance," said John Makumbe, a black political scientist at Zimbabwe University.
"They have focused on making money rather than on governance or social integration. But that focus has created employment, and nothing is as good at distributing economic development as employment," he said. "In Zimbabwe, whites are part of the solution, not part of the problem."
South of the Sahara, whites are only a minuscule and shrinking part of the population. In most countries, they are much less than 1 percent.
Despite their tiny and diminishing numbers, whites are the frequent targets of black political leaders eager to play the race card to disguise their own problems and failures. Since whites once ruled Africa with an iron fist, there is an audience ready to blame them for every failure.
"A black man sees the white man did better and is doing better. He says it is because I am black and because he is white," Makumbe said. "We have had the whites to blame for every ill. Now, there are so few whites left we can't blame them for everything that goes wrong."
In Kenya, for example, there were 60,000 whites in the country at independence in 1962. Today there are only about 40,000 out of a population of 26 million, and about 90 percent are expatriates rather than Kenyan citizens.
White Kenyans are "an endangered species," said John Gith-on-go, the associate editor of the business monthly Executive in Kenya's capital, Nairobi. They are leaving not because blacks are chasing them out but because they see their futures elsewhere, he said.
In Zimbabwe, for the first time, there is a feeling among many of the whites who stayed after black rule that there is no future.
"Verbal attacks on whites by the government of Robert Mugabe have become really pronounced over the last three years and have served to polarize the communities," Meyer said.
Many Zimbabwe whites who sent their children abroad for education or work experience are encouraging them not to return, he said. Some are so determined they sold family businesses to give their children less incentive to come home.
Only in South Africa do whites live in significant numbers. There are more than 5 million, or about 14 percent of the population of more than 40 million, and they hold most of the economic power.
"Whites have concluded they don't have a future in Africa, but in South Africa it is different," Makumbe said. "There are not such numbers leaving. Their role in political life gives them a future. There has to be a future for them in South Africa."
Countries such as the Ivory Coast and Nigeria in West Africa, Kenya in East Africa and Zimbabwe in the south have erected some barriers to whites in the economy. There is a push to force companies to hire blacks at the expense of whites.
Zimbabwe and South Africa also are studying plans to redistribute lands held by whites to black farmers.
But many blacks in West Africa complain their leaders favor whites in a lingering vestige of colonialism. Wealthy blacks educate their children, take holidays and get medical treatment in Europe or the United States.
In some countries, preferential hiring of blacks and efforts to redistribute land seek to rectify inequities caused by white rule. Whites fear that black governments, for political expediency, will go too far and deny white children a future.
Nelson Mandela, South Africa's first black president, counters that governments must take some action to balance the ledger.
"Apartheid and other colonial societies in Africa vested power, wealth, skills and comfort within white minority communities," he said. "It is natural that liberation should entail a protracted process of spreading these advantages - of building a better life for all."
Perhaps it is a sign of the times that years after Rhodesian whites' bloody resistance to majority rule, their last white leader, Ian Smith, looks to South Africa and sees in one black man the last best hope for African whites and racial harmony.
"Fortunately, they have a Mandela," Smith said. "I wish we had a Mandela. He is Africa's first statesman."