As rumour swirled last night of a power-sharing deal that would bring an end to 28 years of rule by President Mugabe, I finally allowed myself to wonder whether this was the moment that Zimbabweans had been waiting for.

The country has weathered economic catastrophe, reducing the land that once fed much of Africa to stark famine, and has seen its highly developed infrastructure collapse.

For the first time, we sensed that the word “change” could become reality.

As a witness to the decline of my adopted country I felt a thrill of something that seemed at once like happiness and anger. These feelings I share with many others, some of whom will no doubt want revenge.

As yesterday began, I sat in my office with the television on. ZTV was broadcasting the third list of the day of results from the parliamentary election and, as it has in every other election announcement in the past two days, it declared one victory to the MDC, the next to Zanu (PF), and then the MDC again, and so on, as if it were dealing out a pack of cards.

On Monday the pattern was curious, then yesterday as it went on it didn’t dawn on me — I just found myself saying that they wouldn’t be carrying out this charade if they were confident of winning or of having rigged it.

Then I found myself saying that Robert Mugabe and the Joint Operational Command, the cabal of spooks and generals who manage Mr Mugabe’s political survival, didn’t know what to do.

The realisation was almost blinding that the man who has never been short of cunning to outwit all those he disagreed with — from Tony Blair to the man waiting at the back of the queue for a loaf of bread — had suddenly been stripped of his invincibility.

When you are in the thick of this stuff you don’t think, you’re too busy writing about it. Profundity and revelation is a luxury. Like eating.

It was a special moment yesterday morning when I gave a lift to a policeman hiking to the girls’ school that had been a polling station and where he said that he was to be on standby. He was in a rage about the dragging-out of the election announcements. “We must have change now,” he said.

Levity helps at these times. “Mugabe’s been declared the winner,” I announced to friends waiting at one of the three press conferences that were meant to be addressed by Morgan Tsvangirai but that didn’t happen.

Then I said: “April fool!” They laughed, because yesterday suddenly something felt as if it was slipping away: Mr Mugabe, the past eight horrible years of being on the edge, of feeling like a chicken in a run waiting to be snatched by the beak of a swooping crow, the sickness of adrenalin that oozes all the time into the stomach, gnaw, gnaw, gnaw.

Then someone who ought to know what he is talking about drew me to a seat in the emptying conference hall and whispered: “They’re talking.” He wouldn’t say anything else.

It has happened. It is slinking off into the gloom, the old crocodile that has breathed terror into all of us, that makes people whisper when they say the word “Mugabe”, that has crushed not just agriculture and industry and the economy but worse — that crushed hope and forced mothers with their babies strapped to their backs to crawl under the barbed-wire fence in to South Africa.

At times of momentous change like this it is difficult to predict how you will feel. When, at last it seemed as though Mr Mugabe’s rule was close to an end, there was a feeling of almost divine relief.

I felt a surge of something that was happy anger and, I’m afraid, I wanted revenge.

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