A face so badly swollen that he could barely see, and a long sutured gash on the side of his head were Morgan Tsvangirai’s rewards this week for defying President Robert Mugabe.

Yet the warm clap from onlookers responding to his defiant open-hand salute from the ambulance at Harare Magistrates’ Court on Tuesday was like an expression of relief that his spirit had not been battered into submission by 48 hours of repeated assault by police.

Zimbabwe’s newest crisis, marked by the first spontaneous surge of discontent since the 83-year-old tyrant began to drag the country into ruin seven years ago, appears to have galvanised Tsvangirai out of timidity.

He can rightly fear death at Mugabe’s hands. In 1998, as the national labour union chief who just had led the country’s first nationwide strike since independence in 1980, he narrowly escaped being thrown out of his tenth-floor office window by a group of Mugabe’s war veterans’ militia.

Twenty months ago, Tsvangirai was so frightened that he would not get out of his bullet-proofed vehicle to talk to Harare township residents being forced to destroy their own homes under Mugabe’s Operation Sweep Out the Rubbish that made 700,000 people homeless.

In mid-2005 he confused his supporters by walking out of a national party debate and refusing to accept a vote to contest elections for a controversial new senate. He effectively split the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) in two and radically impaired its chances in any further elections.

These supporters have been intensely loyal since he left the union in 1999 to become the first leader of the MDC.

Six months later, Tsvangirai’s charisma helped to secure the MDC victory in a referendum to reject a fraudulent draft constitution put up by Mugabe, and inflicted Mugabe’s first national electoral defeat.

Thirty-seven of Tsvangirai’s supporters, including his driver and his aide, were murdered in the first year of Mugabe’s blitzkrieg to smash the MDC, and many thousands were battered, maimed, burnt and raped. Despite that, Tsvangirai drew Zimbabweans in their millions to vote for him and the MDC in the next three elections until 2005, each one progressively more marred by cheating and violent intimidation by Mugabe.

The eldest of nine children, Tsvangirai was involved only peripherally in the resistance movement against white rule that brought Mugabe to power in 1980. He worked as a factory hand and then a mining company supervisor before becoming a unionist.

Mugabe scorns Tsvangirai’s background. “Some drive trains, some are foremen,” he said. “People who witnessed the liberation struggle will not accept you as leader.”

Tsvangirai replied: “At least the train driver keeps the train on its tracks.”

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