On a platform in front of them, their great leader Robert Mugabe was denouncing Tony Blair for "spending sleepless nights plotting how he can remove the Zimbabwe government" and telling them to "bury Blair, vote Zanu-PF". But then another woman, shaded from the sun by a large coloured umbrella, repeated the word: "Hungry."

Agitated secret service men from the Central Intelligence Organisation (CIO) started to take names. The 81-year-old president, perspiring behind his large, plastic-rimmed glasses, was hustled away. But the damage was done.

The story of the Gwanda rally may prove apocryphal but by the end of last week it was being recounted in villages and bars across the country. From Matabeleland to Manicaland, the refrain of "hungry" seemed to be on everyone's lips. Along rutted tracks winding between failed maize crops, one person after another held up open-fingered palms and said "chinja" or change, the slogan of the opposition.

"This is the beginning of the end," said Solomon Saungweme, standing in the ruins of his home in the Manicaland village of Ngirazi. The house was burnt down last week by youths from Zanu-PF, which he once supported. Afterwards they raped his 18-year-old daughter-in-law. "We don't care any more about Mugabe's threats. It's better to die now than to starve to death," he said.

While Mugabe's friends Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia, Daniel arap Moi of Kenya and Namibia's Sam Nujoma have all left office, Africa's last remaining independence leader has used every trick in the brutality book to stay in power.

Many of those who dared to oppose Mugabe have been tortured and killed, and their womenfolk raped; the free press has been bombed and closed down; almost all the white commercial farmers have been kicked off their farms, destroying the country's agriculture and leaving the nation hungry; and food aid has been reserved for followers of the ruling party. Supporters of Mugabe have been rewarded with jobs and farms, making all sectors of society complicit. The recipients of farms include 15 high court judges, senior military and police officers and the Anglican bishop of Harare.

But with the country in its third year of a drought, Mugabe may have gone too far. Last year he halted foreign food aid, announcing that the country had a bumper harvest and was "choking" on food.

Yet diplomats estimate the harvest of maize, Zimbabwe's staple, at 300,000 tons, one-sixth of what it needs. The opposition claims the government has been handing out D-grade maize usually used for animal feed. Foodnet, an international organisation that monitors hunger, estimates that more than 5m people, almost half the population, are on the verge of starvation. Another 3m - many of them professional people - have already voted with their feet and gone abroad. The country has been left perilously short of doctors and nurses. As those who remain go to the polls in parliamentary elections this Thursday, people are daring to believe that Mugabe's sins may finally be returning to haunt him.

The first sign I found that things may be changing came when I arrived in Bulawayo eight days ago working undercover - as British reporters have been forced to do for several years since Mugabe stopped letting most of us in.

Over tea and toast, David Coltart, the legal affairs spokesman of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), talked excitedly of a "new mood sweeping through the country".

"Everywhere we go, people are coming to us saying, 'We're right behind you'," said Coltart. "It's the first time we have that combination of a stolen election and hungry, angry people who blame Mugabe for their plight."

The mood was very different at the office of the city's Roman Catholic archbishop, Pius Ncube, one of the few people to attack Mugabe openly. His telephone has been blocked so that he cannot dial out and CIO spies sit on the wall outside.

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