primary colours

In the dark grocery shop at Halfway House, the assistant weighs my pears and rings in my wild blueberries on a calculator. There's no power to get the till working. Everything's normal. Or nearly.

"We saw people back there," I say quietly. "Walking along the road. Where were they going?"

Until Headlands, there'd been no sign to suggest elections were on this month. No campaign posters, no trucks full of noisy activists (singing's been banned in the eastern city of Mutare in the run-up to the polls, the Manica Post says). Just miles and miles of straight empty road. The road (unpotholed here because there's less traffic) stretches like a white-grey ribbon, bordered by shimmering rust-tipped grass and pine and bottle-brush trees so green they're speckled with black. After a few years here, I know now that these are Zimbabwe's primary colours: roadline grey, black-green, rust. And blue, the well-washed and faded blue of the sky without a cloud the size of a man's hand.

The women walk slowly but purposefully, in groups of two or three. Doeks on their heads, babies on their backs. It's mid-morning. The sun is already high and hot. There are several dozen of them, probably somewhere around 80. Very few men. A church service perhaps? Men aren't so keen on church-going here, not traditionally. But the faces that turn to look at our car are closed, not like the ones we drove past a fortnight ago flocking to an outdoor service in eastern Honde Valley, where the tea grows.

"It's a rally," the shop assistant says. There's a pile of gooey koeksusters next to the till. "It's Didymus Mutasa. He is having a rally in the location." He gives an apologetic half-smile.

I know why. Mutasa is Mugabe's state security minister and - despite the koeksusters (an Afrikaans delicacy) and the colonial style Cape Dutch gables at Halfway House -- Headlands is a ruling party stronghold. Like Macheke, a few miles further on. These are bad places to be opposition supporters or white farmers. Ouma and her late husband used to live somewhere near here. He was Polish. They took his farm even though Ouma is black. "He had a heart attack," Ouma says. "It killed him." Mutasa's the one who said back in 2002 that Zimbabwe would be better off with only six million people (ie half the population) as long as they were supporters of the ruling party.

We climb back into the car, shaking the sand from the car park off our feet. So often Zimbabwe looks as stunning as a picture postcard. Scratch the surface though, and the fear, the politics and the old hatreds are never far away.