Pizzas galore!

"There is no way Mugabe is going to lose these elections," he said. "They are going to rig them and they will get away with it. This is not Kiev."

The archbishop pointed at posters of Martin Luther King, Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela above his desk and bemoaned the lack of leadership in Zimbabwe. "Ninety-five per cent of people are fed up with Mugabe but they don't know what to do. They have no real leader to motivate them and are frightened that Mugabe will turn the army on them.

"I feel powerless. We are no longer even allowed to feed people, we cannot hold a prayer meeting for more than four without police permission and my own priests are being bribed [with] computers and farms."

That evening I met a terrified woman in an empty car park under the cover of darkness. Her name was Maggie and she sobbed as she recounted how a soldier had come to the house where she sells firewood to support her family and warned her that she was now a "Zanu-PF target" for supporting the MDC.

"How will my four children survive when they come and kill me?" she wailed.

Frightened as she was, Maggie nevertheless insisted that she would vote MDC; and as I travelled across Zimbabwe last week from west to east, I found that people who were terrified to be seen with a foreign journalist on my last visit in November were now openly criticising the government.

The capital, Harare, has long been an MDC stronghold. But in a country where e-mails are monitored, it was still a surprise to find students downloading Mugabe jokes from a computer and stamping 20,000-dollar notes - each worth less than Ï1 - with "Enough!" to protest against inflation running at 400%. The real shock came in the Zanu-PF heartland of Mashonaland West. In the farming district of Norton, southwest of Harare, we stopped at the burnt-out shell of a farm that had belonged to Terry Ford, a white farmer murdered three years ago and found with his small terrier whimpering beside his battered body.

"What was the point?" asked Joe Whaley, the neighbour who found him and whose own farm was seized by one of Mugabe's nephews. "They killed Terry and are not even doing anything with the farm."

A little further on were the ruins of Peter MacSporran's tobacco farm. The house has been stripped of windows, doors, bricks, sockets, lavatories, tiles - anything that could be sold. As we wandered around nervously, expecting Zanu-PF militia to appear, a group of young men in dirty T-shirts emerged and held out their palms, saying: "Chinja."

"The government dumped us here," said one of them, who can be identified only as Mylove. "I was working as a gardener in Harare but they promised us land so we came here. They gave us no help and we are hungry, we have no food or future, we are just living in the bush like monkeys, eating fruit and whatever we can find.”

During the last parliamentary elections in 2000 and the presidential poll in 2002, such a conversation would have been unthinkable. Scattered throughout rural areas were camps of “Green Bombers”, Mugabe’s youth militia, who rounded up, beat and tortured local people. Some 300 MDC workers were killed in those campaigns.

This time Mugabe has called off the thugs, apparently intent on regaining some international stature before he retires. Zimbabwean television has even been reporting on MDC rallies.

The opposition is baffled. One explanation is that Mugabe believes people are so cowed that he need do no more. Solidarity Peace Trust, a religious group that monitors human rights, reported a few months ago that about 300,000 Zimbabweans — one in 40 — had been beaten, tortured or denied food since 2000.

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