A week is a long time in politics. A month in Zimbabwe is an age. When I left the country in May, Morgan Tsvangirai was on his way back in, bloodied and bowed but still vowing to fight on despite the escalating brutality against his supporters.

Zimbabwe's transformation now seems complete: from hope to fear in four weeks. On a 500-mile (800km) journey across the country, I saw truckloads of howling Zanu (PF) militiamen, careering down main roads waving their weapons in clear view. In Bulawayo, an opposition stronghold previously untouched by the violence, a doctor promised to call when the next victim from the Movement for Democratic Change came in. It took only a couple of hours.

Right in the middle of Harare, next to one of its smartest suburbs, a re-education camp was in full session, crowds sitting in the long grass in identical Zanu T-shirts, being taught to chant pro-Mugabe slogans and punch the air with their fists.

Everywhere were the posters of President Mugabe, plastered over walls, bridges, buildings, announcing “The Final Battle for Total Control”.

We were greeted by Moses, an old friend, whose wife lives in one of the townships to which the violence had recently spread.

Every day for the past week, she had been rounded up by Zanu (PF) members, along with her neighbours, and marched to a school building where they were forced to join in the proMugabe chants from 9pm to 3am. On Wednesday a senior party official pulled out a pistol and fired through the roof to show what would happen if the election went wrong. “She was shaking,” Moses said.

“Before, we were just hearing these stories from the rural areas,” Mr Marangetza, an injured opposition supporter, said in a hospital in Bulawayo. “Now it's coming to us here in the cities where we thought we were safe.”

If a month ago you had to go looking for trouble, today it is all around. When we drove into Harare, the usually busy streets were deserted. “Nobody is going out,” Moses said. “If you do not have your Zanu ID they will beat you and take you to the camps.”

Around the re-education camp near the upmarket Chisipite district, the wealthy householders are treated to a nightly pungwe, the Shona word for a party - a misnomer, in this case - for what are in fact all-night sessions of revolutionary singing, West-bashing and pro-Mugabe chanting, all at the barrel of a gun. The chanters are their own domestic servants, forced there by the youth militia who go door-to-door rounding them up and forcing on them T-shirts and headscarves proclaiming “100 per cent empowerment”.

The depth of brutality is shocking: the six-year-old child burnt alive; the wife of Harare's mayor-elect whose hands and foot were chopped off before she was flung into the flames and burnt there too. But the breadth of it is astounding too. So much so that even usually compliant SADC observers were forced to report seeing two people shot dead in front of them.

Mr Marangetza went to an MDC rally on Saturday evening, emboldened in part by the presence of observers. Two truckloads of Zanu youth militias turned up regardless, waiting patiently for the supporters to disperse. “The observers left very quickly then,” he said, “like they knew what would happen.” The youths set upon a man in his sixties, beating him to the ground, and when Mr Marangetza intervened they beat him to the ground too, breaking his arm in two places and opening a bloody gash in his skull.

The violence had previously been concentrated in Mashonaland and Masvingo, traditional Mugabe strongholds which turned against him in March and are now paying the price. Its spread to Bulawayo, a long-time opposition stronghold long given up on by Zanu, came as a disturbing turn. And then came the most audacious raid yet on Mr Tsvangirai's rally planned for yesterday in Harare.

“It has to stop, the whole world is watching him now,” the Bulawayo doctor said as she studied Mr Marangetza's X-rays. The patient was less sure: “I think we've got him for life.” Yet he remained defiant. “I will express myself on the election day,” he said.

That was before Mr Tsvangirai pulled out. A day is an age in Zimbabwe. The race may be over, but is the violence? The chants continue to rise from the camp in the distance and the Zanu trucks thunder through Harare. This does not feel over yet.

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