The first time I felt this thing was in 1991, waiting outside the polling station in the Zambian village of Mazabuka and asking wrinkled little men and women coming out if they felt better after voting. Yes, they all said. We want change. Within days, President Kaunda was gone, after 27 years of bumbling, benign dictatorship that brought nothing but poverty.

Two years later I felt it in the wet, lightless streets of Blantyre in Malawi at 4am, where queues coiled endlessly round the buildings. I asked the people waiting in silent determination what they were going to do. Change, they said. And before long, Hastings Banda, the 100-year-old Life President of the land of silent fear, was no longer president.

It is a delicious, thrilling thing. It is best after many years of brutality and poverty, and especially hopelessness: the more terrible, the better. It seems to fill the air with positive ions, like rain. It spreads undetected like radiation through entire populations.

Now I am feeling the same thing here in Zimbabwe. Everyone I speak to says “change”. I gave a lift to a pastor this week and mentioned the elections on Saturday. It loosed a flood of anger from the mild-mannered churchman, who berated Robert Mugabe as “half-man, half-beast”. We want change now, he said. Others say, “the clock is ticking fast”, or “it is D-Day tomorrow”.

We have had tantalising snatches of this thing, this mood in the air, in the past eight years: in the referendum in 2000 on a faked-up draft constitution in which President Mugabe was beaten in a fair fight; in the last three elections when people in the towns thought they prevailed over the Mugabe regime, but the rural people were beaten raw to stick their broken Xs where they were told, and had their lips sealed about the barrowloads of premarked ballot papers stuffed into the boxes.

But now in villages where a white man is never seen, old crones for whom Mugabe was God are saying “it is time for the husband to get a new wife”, and doing jigs at rallies with their hands stretched wide open for the opposition MDC. There are posters with the beaming faces of Morgan Tsvangirai and Simba Makoni on baobab trees that you thought would wither before their shiny bark supported any likeness other than Mugabe's.

The hopelessness that there will never be change has been overtaken by the hopelessness that things are so bad that the people don't care any more what the men in power can do to them. A colleague witnessed a policeman in a small town ordering a group of MDC supporters to disperse. The leader of the group barked back at the policeman: “I am starving, I have nothing, you can't do anything to me, we are not listening to you, we are going on with our meeting.” They continued their banned meeting and the cop walked meekly away.

The enforcers, the policemen with holes in their socks who extort bribes from motorists to pay for supper, are also at that point. Two of the buses festooned with MDC posters at Tsvangirai's rally on Sunday bore the name of the owner on the side of the driver's door - it was the chief of a Harare township police station.

The Herald, Harare's daily paper that Goebbels would be proud of, reported this week that a policeman had been arrested for poking his finger at the chest of a youth wearing a Mugabe T-shirt and asking: “Why are you wearing the shirt of the party of hunger?”

All this has happened so fast, the fruit of so many different circumstances combining: the hunger that makes you retch, the tragic absurdity of paying five million Zimbabwe dollars for an egg, the queuing for half the day at the ATM to withdraw money for your bus fare home. The imploding of the rotting, ruling Zanu (PF), the violence that everyone was waiting for ahead of the elections that never erupted. And Makoni, who defied Mugabe, and the expectations that he would be found dead by the end of the week but who instead goes on railing against the old crocodile.

All these elements have helped to create a gorgeous, rich, spurting flower. It is democracy at its headiest. We are somewhere around the elusive “tipping point”.

The will for change is virtually tangible. But Mugabe has defied it again and again, and people have suffered for daring. He will try to cook this election and is ready to hold on to power by mass murder. Whether his regime can be overwhelmed by weight of numbers and emotion, whether the enforcers still have the will to defend the man who offers only far worse misery, remains to be seen.

The people of Kenya were regarded as placid until President Kibaki stole the election last year. Unlike Kenya, Zimbabwe has no serious tribal animosity. The only enemy is Mugabe.

Jan Raath has been reporting from Zimbabwe since 1975

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