In Mbare township, almost exactly 28 years ago, I stood and trembled as an exultant, raucous mob surged down the road towards me. Minutes before, Robert Mugabe and his Zanu (PF) had been announced the victors of 1980’s independence election.

This week, as final results from parliamentary elections revealed defeat for Mr Mugabe and his party, I was in the same spot. This time there was no revelry. Women hurried past with buckets of water on their heads. A lunatic was declaiming passionately from a rubbish heap on the pavement. I wandered over to a banana-seller. “Are you happy now?” I asked. “Of course,” he replied softly. “Tiripanyanga” — Shona for “We are in control”. A car swept past, its hooter blaring in lone celebration.

In the queue at the bakery, a man said: “Change was inevitable.” About six of us, complete strangers, shook hands warmly, but that was all.

The night before, some friends had been drinking in the townships. There was a police roadblock outside the hotel in Highfield. They took no notice of us, a group of whites. The bar was deserted except for two men playing pool and one drunk. “This is a Zanu (PF) bar,” said the drunk. Then he whispered: “But change is coming. Don’t say it loud.”

Another dive in Warren Park was half full with people watching Liverpool play Arsenal on a TV screen so green that it was almost impossible to see anything. As I asked why no one was celebrating, a convoy of vehicles carrying riot police passed at the bottom of the street. “Because of them,” came the reply.

“Also, we are waiting for the big one. Then we party big time.”

People are still buttoned up. The parliamentary victory is satisfying, but “he” is still there, radiating menace. Only when it has been announced that he has lost the presidential vote will the mask slip, so deep is the mistrust and fear that he will suddenly declare himself the winner and wreak vengeance.

But the fear was evaporating. Every day that passed made the situation harder to reverse. Outside Harvest House, the MDC’s headquarters in the city centre, a crowd of 100 swaggering young men was lounging among cars parked three deep across the road — they have become a permanent feature of Nelson Mandela Avenue over the past three days. A week ago they would have been bludgeoned and scattered by a riot squad.

On Wednesday night six uniformed policemen, a couple of them armed, came into the City Bowling Club, a scruffy bar frequented by white, mostly older, boozers. They sat down at the counter, bought beers and, as they warmed to the clientele, were bought more. “They don’t have the stomach to go into the streets and shoot people,” one drinker said. “Rather drink with the people than shoot them.”

Mr Mugabe’s ban on international media is failing: the BBC, supposedly out for the past six years, and Sky are here, and CNN and NBC are following. Bright Matonga, the blustery Deputy Information Minister, is turning into Zimbabwe’s Comical Ali.

But by the end of a momentous week, the farce was turning into tragedy. On Thursday night armed riot police barged into a suburban tourist lodge, looking for “illegal journalists”. Two of them are still in custody.

Yesterday morning several hundred men, aged between 20 and 40, marched through the centre of town, not demonstrators but men being mobilised. Desperate rural young men like this, you give a couple of million Zimbabwe dollars, a meal, some beer and they will become a pack of murderous dogs for you.

Everything was back to where it was. The dread, the not knowing, the helplessness, the imminence of an unpredictable, violently deranged power.

The people knew this could happen and they have kept their joy for another time.

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