Marondera, the town from which I am reporting, is not attractive. It reminds you faintly of an Essex new town, except that the sun shines and the streets are crawling with secret policemen. You can tell such men everywhere in the world by their clothes. Here, in their sports jackets and ties the men of the CIO look smarter and more formidable than the average citizen. They walk down the middle of the pavement, and everyone else makes way for them.
We went upstairs to the CIO office. A steel grille prevented us from going in, but yet another man in a sports jacket told us through the grille that the local CIO boss wasn't there. That was a pity, because we wanted him to explain to us the link between the government, the CIO and the gangs of supposed war veterans who have been touring the white farms in this area, telling the farmers they have until tomorrow to leave. He would probably have refused, but this being Zimbabwe, several white farmers have successfully asked him for help.
Marondera is, however, as nasty as Zimbabwe gets. The national head of the CIO stood for the ruling Zanu-PF here, and when it became clear that he was losing, men in police uniforms arrived at the count, threw out everyone except the head of the local election observers, and counted the votes themselves. The CIO boss won by a small margin. As for the chief observer, he was so terrified that he refuses to make a report - the only constituency where this has happened.
Still, the opposition MDC has lodged a legal challenge to the result, and it is likely to be upheld. Then the men in sports jackets will be out with a will - looking for people to beat up. At most constituencies around Marondera, the MDC did well. We came across a small group of men by the side of the road, and knew they were MDC because they started cheering when they saw us. (Zanu-PF is just as opposed to the Western media as Ian Smith's Rhodesia Front was in the old days.)
The head of the group was very short, and very tough. "I'm not worried, because I've got my gang," he said. Members of the gang clapped and laughed and waved the red cards which are their symbol. Suddenly, the MDC has realised how strong it is: 57 seats in parliament mean a lot of votes, a lot of clout and the kind of self-confidence which simply didn't exist in the days before the election.
Zanu-PF knows it too. The hit squads of activists who are going around threatening white farmers are small in number, and slightly less confident than they were.
At the junction of the main Marondera road and Theydon Road (again, that faint whiff of Essex), outside the town, we came across a group of people with mobile telephones. The boss was a sharp-witted woman called Susan, with a mirthless laugh. Her sidekick, Eddie Muswe, was wearing one of those leather jackets you see only in Africa, with panels made from every type of skin from elephant to ostrich.
Seeing us, they were deeply embarrassed, and denied having anything to do with the taking over of farms. It was, they said, definitely someone else. Listening to them, I realised what a con trick this business of taking over farms has become. Zimbabwe isn't Sierra Leone. When the squatters arrive, they are not armed.
The number of deaths in political violence since April is disturbingly high for Zimbabwe, but it is still only 37. In South Africa, 32 people are murdered every weekend. The invaders put the frighteners on people. They arrive, they stick their makeshift pegs in the ground to mark out the land they want, and they start demanding food and money with menaces.
The white farmers are duly nervous. Time and again, in Marondera and other threatened areas, they are too scared to talk to us on camera. "If only they realised," said an MDC activist, "that as long as they keep quiet about what's happening to them it'll keep on happening."
The MDC, and especially its black members, have realised the truth of this, hence their new confidence. Zanu-PF and the farm invaders have realised it, hence their anxiety. The CIO has realised it, hence its large numbers. Maybe the white farmers will realise it eventually, too, and lose their timidity. Things have changed in this past week. Robert Mugabe is no longer president-for-life. Even he has to watch out.
So she joined the Movement for Democratic Change. Sibonakaliso, 38, isn't particularly well educated: she is a child of the old, white Rhodesia, where the schooling of black people was not a priority. But as she travelled round the troubled farms outside Harare in the weeks before yesterday's election, gathering the workers together and preaching the need for change, you could see that she had real presence and style.
"Chinja maitiro!" she called out, "change now!" Slowly, the workers in their tattered blue overalls repeated the words and raised their open hands in the MDC salute, well aware that supporters from the governing Zanu-PF party might soon be coming round to beat up or kill anyone who seemed like an enthusiast for the MDC gospel. In the heavy atmosphere, created by the drying tobacco leaves hanging all round them in the big shed, there was real nervousness in the air.
This is by nature a peaceable country. Politics aside, crime is remarkably low. In African Unity Square in the centre of Harare, the traders leave their goods out on the stalls overnight and expect to find them there when they come back the next morning. At Robert Mugabe's last rally of the election campaign a couple of policemen in smart khaki told the moderately large crowd to sit down and they did so; and when a drunk came and started abusing my camera team, shouting much the same kind of thing that President Mugabe himself says about Britain and the BBC, a large policewoman carrying a Thatcheresque handbag walked over and sorted him out quickly.
What has happened, though, is that this essentially quiet, easy-going country has been racked by the deliberately stimulated violence of the election campaign. No one, before the beginning of the year, thought the MDC stood any chance of challenging President Mugabe's power. It was a complete surprise to Zanu-PF when the constitutional referendum in February went against them, and they began at once to pull out all the stops. As a direct result of the intimidation and violence since then, the already weak economy has crashed and the country's entire future seems in question.
At first, when Mr Mugabe began blaming the white population and the British for everything bad that has happened to this country, it seemed to be nothing more than he has habitually done at election time. This time, though, the campaign has been far worse and more violent. An official handout entitled The People's 15 Reasons For Voting Zanu-PF says under the heading "Racial Reconciliation" that the hand of peace offered by Zanu-PF "has been rejected by most white Zimbabweans who continue to practise racism against our people by urinating in their mouths, beating black people up, shooting and killing farm workers" and so on.
All of these things have happened; but to accuse "most" white Zimbabweans of being racist seems deliberately divisive. The ferocity of the Zanu-PF campaign has, at last, created in remarkably large numbers of people here the sense that things shouldn't be like this; that change is required. I have covered many elections, but this is the first time that I have failed to find a single person in the capital city (officials apart) who supported the government.
It's true that the government expects to lose the Harare constituencies anyway; but as the election came closer, more and more people in rural areas seemed to feel the need for change as well. This isn't Uganda under Idi Amin. However much intimidation may be going on, however much the results may be manipulated, the act of voting is secret and people know it. What is more, there is a vigorous free press which will trumpet a very different version of events from the official one.
"We cannot always have one man and one party running everything," said a man in Nelson Mandela Avenue.
"I just decided I had to do something myself," said Sibonakaliso Nkomo, as she lectured the tobacco workers about the need to vote. Whatever the officially declared result, change - chinja - is in the air in Zimbabwe.
By late in the afternoon, when the dust thrown up by returning cattle had turned golden in the fading sun, Comrade Slit-Eyes was drunk on meths. Seated with some of his followers around a fire against the winter chill, the womenfolk chopping broccoli for dinner, he lurched to his feet when visitors appeared at Pearson Farm, which the group he leads has occupied since March.
"Get away from our land or we will break your heads," he shouted. Instead of red bandannas around their heads, they had red Robert Mugabe sun-visors, and rather than AK-47s they had pangas, but otherwise Comrade Slit-Eyes and Co were frighteningly similar to the warlords that have made so much of West Africa ungovernable.
For four months, groups such as these have had licence to kill, beat and rape across Zimbabwe to intimidate rural people into voting for Mr Mugabe's Zanu-PF. Now that the elections are over and Zanu-PF back in government, most of these so-called war veterans are refusing to return home, which suggests that Mr Mugabe has unleashed a force that he can no longer control.
"Commander" Tski Mabunu, speaking at Glenara Farm in Mashonaland, the operations base for many of the farm invasions, said: "We were promised land and will not leave until our superiors come and peg out our plots. They better come soon because it's time to start ploughing."
After the results, which saw Zanu-PF hanging on to power with 62 seats, compared with 57 for the nine-month-old Movement for Democratic Change, Mr Mugabe addressed the nation, saying that "winners and losers have to work together". Those close to him, however, say that the President is furious at the idea of opposition, and particularly at the loss of all 19 seats in the capital, Harare, and all 13 in Bulawayo.
Comparing him to a wounded buffalo, one Zanu-PF member said: "He's in a precarious position and will be intent on doing his worst to prove his power." After losing the referendum on a new constitution in February, Mr Mugabe made a similarly magnanimous speech, then unleashed the campaign of terror that left 31 people dead and thousands beaten, raped and homeless.
In Mashonaland Central, Mr Mugabe's political heartland, reprisals have already begun. Under the leadership of Border Gezi, the provincial governor, Operation Mole has been launched to dig out those who voted MDC. Mr Gezi's own seat, Bindura, is one of 20 being legally challenged by the MDC because of pre-election intimidation and a "phantom" ballot box containing an extra 3,000 votes.
Malcolm Vowles of the Commercial Farmers' Union (CFU), said: "We are in a state of high alert. Many farmers have had visits warning them to leave their properties."
Tomorrow is the deadline for appeals from the 804 white-owned farms listed for resettlement. More than 600 farmers are appealing and the procedure is expected to tie up courts for many months, as the government must show that each seizure is in the national interest. Mr Mugabe is in a tricky position.
If he seizes the farms, investors will refuse to come back to Zimbabwe, and the economy, which has shrunk 10 per cent in past year, will be doomed. With unemployment at 60 per cent, an increasing number of people are living on the streets of Harare, and it is common to see children with wire hooks chasing pigeons to cook on pavement fires.
Mr Mugabe, however, needs to reward those whose terror tactics helped to secure his narrow victory and whom he may need again for the presidential elections in 2002. "Land will be coming to the people in a big way," he said in his post-election speech. If not, the war veterans say they will take matters into their own hands. Last week saw a stepping-up of farm invasions. The CFU said yesterday that at least 25 farms have been occupied since the election, taking the total under occupation - by about 12,000 war veterans - to 1,654.
The daily allowances paid to the war veterans before the elections have stopped, and many of them are angry, threatening farmers and demanding food. At Butleigh Farm in Mutepatepa, 23 war veterans have taken over the nursery, preventing farmworkers' children going to school. Eliah Muwengwa, the veterans' leader, said: "We were brought here by the government and we are 100 miles from our homes. We are waiting for instructions." Asked what he would do if Mr Mugabe told them to leave, he said: "We are not going anywhere. The President promised us we would get land, and now we expect to get it, even if we have to plough fields with our bare hands."
Many of the farms under occupation are not even on the list to be seized. Pearson Farm has not been listed, but Comrade Slit-Eyes's band says it will take it anyway. For the past 11 weeks, the group has kept the owners, Rob and Valerie Marshall, from their own house, warning them that they will be killed if they try to return. A Zanu-PF banner printed with Mr Mugabe's face now hangs over the gate and the Marshalls have moved to a relative's house.
Biggie Chitoro, one of the most notorious war veterans, was arrested on Thursday, suggesting that the government might be about to turn on its own hit-men. This, however, may be a one-off - as we were threatened by war veterans at Glenara Farm, police drove past.
Farmers are beginning to fear that the anarchy that has plagued Zimbabwe could yet worsen. "We hoped with the elections that this nightmare would be over but now they seem out of control," said Mr Marshall.