and the winner is

Zimbabwean writer Olley Maruma is a ruling party diehard. In Coming Home, a book he published last year, he speaks scornfully of whites' "wishful thinking" ahead of the landslide victory of the Patriotic Front in the country's first independent elections in 1980. It was a traumatic experience for whites, he says. "For them, the victory was made all the more stunning by the fact that both the local and the foreign press had predicted that the Patriotic Front (PF-ZANU, led by Mugabe and PF-ZAPU, led by Joshua Nkomo) would win no more than 50 percent of the seats." He quotes an Australian reporter: "How could a sane people do this to themselves?"

Twenty-eight years on, and everyone's talking about what's going to happen in two and a half weeks' time. "Surely," my mother-in-law's white friends say. "Surely, this time?" and they recount conversations with domestic workers, the man behind the till at Halsteds, anyone who'll bolster their hope that change is finally on the horizon.

At a party at the weekend, I watch an animated American NGO worker. She is telling a black Zimbabwean -- his kids are somewhere in the garden -- that she just can't understand "these people." "These people" are the ones you see on TV on ZBC News Hour (one agency reporter calls it News Horror) every night -- waving, toyi-toying and chanting at ruling party rallies. You can drive people to rallies. But you can't make them dance with smiles on their faces. That comes from the heart, surely. "I mean, you tell me why," she says, exasperated. In the local Shona culture, women do not look men in the eye. They do not wear short skirts (Agonita, 58, once told me off for wearing a "mean" skirt). Some men even object to unrelated women smiling at them. Traditionally, a woman smiles for her husband only.

The man shifts uncomfortably on his seat, looks away from her. "The war, you know," he says. "People remember that war."

The war for independence is only half a lifetime away for people like Ellias, a college lecturer. He remembers when he and his wife weren't allowed to buy a house in the "good" suburbs. They quietly saved up their cash and bought as soon as independence was declared in 1980: a bungalow with parquet floors, a well in the garden, maid's quarters round the back. There were atrocities during that war, atrocities that state TV is making sure no-one forgets, showing grainy footage of white soldiers manhandling a black during News Hour advert breaks. Defence chief Paradzayi Zimondi has warned there'll be war again if Mugabe doesn't win. "We don't want to go back to that," Ellias says. He explained a Shona proverb to me recently. "If you're ploughing a field and there's a tree-stump in the middle," he said, "you don't stop what you're doing and try to pull the stump out. You plough round it." You make a plan. You don't necessarily have to uproot the problem.

"People are really fired up," a local cafe-owner tells me. "They're fed up. They say, this time we're going to win. Things are going to change." Yes, but they said that before elections in 2000, 2002 and 2005, didn't they?

The opposition's in a bad way. Not only is Tsvangirai's MDC split in two but there's been a fair amount of dirty linen-washing that's had the ruling party rubbing its hands in glee. News Hour showed a press conference last night with an MDC candidate defecting from the Tsvangirai-MDC to the Arthur Mutambara-led side. He says some in Tsvangirai's party are "dictators". There's friction too between Tsvangirai and new-man-on-the-block Makoni. Tendai Biti, the Tsvangirai-faction secretary general described Makoni as "zhing-zhong", slang for a cheap, Chinese imported good that won't last. But a sitting MP from the Tsvangirai faction says - privately, of course - that though he'd "love" Tsvangirai to win, he thinks Makoni would make a better transition.

Outside Nolan's Electronics, I watch three men. One of them's jabbing his finger at a newspaper and they too are talking animatedly. "Better the devil you know," he says in English. There's only one campaign poster near our house and it's for Mugabe.

I may be wrong, but...