supper

"They say they won't kill us. They just want their properties back," the note read.

Matabeleland, 1982. S's 23-year-old son had taken his girlfriend to the family farm for a party. S was in Bulawayo, not on the farm, but that morning she'd been violently sick. So had the girlfriend.

"Premonitions," says S, matter-of-factly.

S's son went out with his grandfather to a small mine on the farm. The pair never returned.

The note, handwritten by S's son, was delivered to the house that day. The body of S's father was discovered hours later by the mine. There was no sign of her son.

Who was behind the attack? The general consensus was that it was ZAPU , the Ndebele-based opposition to Robert Mugabe's ZANU. The Matabele "troubles" were just starting: in the mid-1980s around 20,000 died. Many were killed by Mugabe's Korean-trained Fifth Brigade, who were officially clamping down on "dissidents".

The then security minister Emmerson Mnangagwa wrote S and her husband a letter, promising that those responsible would be punished. "And some people hung for it," she says. "I don't know who." There was, of course, always the suspicion -- never voiced, never investigated -- that the Fifth Brigade themselves were behind the attack.

They found S's son's body nine months later, two weeks before her first grandchild was born.

"That's what I was praying for, that they'd find him first," she says.

She wipes her mouth delicately on her serviette. She's in her 80s now, a widow. "It will take me the rest of my life to get over it," she says.

"And now it's 27 years later and what do I read in the paper? ZAPU wants its properties back. Such a flimsy thing to kill someone for. If it was them."

homecoming

We get back home to darkness. "The power is bad now," Mai Agnes says. "They cut it yesterday, and Monday." Our 'phone line has been cut (as has half the town's, we learn later. C's outstanding bill is for 3,000 US, three times ours). We can receive calls but we can't make them. Those in the know inform us that you get a grace period and then the line goes totally dead. I see the money I brought back for schoolfees will have to be diverted. My cellphone has been cut: I've gone too long without "rejuicing", apparently. I find to my horror that supermarket prices have gone up (S, a local retailer, explains that it's because of the strengthening rand: most goods are imported from SA but once here, they're priced in US). "Give us more time," the headline on the local Manica Post newspaper reads. Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai is trying to stave off strikes by civil servants. More hopeful still (NOT), former High Court judge George Smith is warning of 'anarchy' within a year. My son and I struggle to wash ourselves by candlelight in a baby-bath half-full of warm water. "South Africa is a delicious country, isn't it Mum?" he says.

president showerhead

"President Mugabe is a pooh," says my six-year old Afrikaans niece. My son chuckles. At five, toilet humour is his idea of fun too. "President Mugabe is a pooh, a pooh," he chants.

This could be a problem. Chloe lives in South Africa, where you're allowed to freely criticise your leaders. Ask her who the president of South Africa is and she'll giggle: "President Showerhead", the widely-used nickname for Jacob Zuma, who testified in a rape case that he'd showered to minimise the risk of HIV infection. Chloe has heard her Zimbabwean father (and no doubt many others) slam Mugabe at the dinner table. My son hasn't. In Zimbabwe, criticising Mugabe is a jailable offense. State media often carries stories of individuals picked up because a CIO officer sitting behind them in a commuter omnibus heard them badmouthing the Father of the Nation. At home, we use the code RGM when we talk about Mugabe so our child doesn't repeat what he's heard. Our neighbours are ZANU-PF as are half the kids at his preschool (which is why the school can't organise farm visits anymore in case the small visitors tell their parents where they can find a nice farm...) We've even had to hide what we do from our child ("When the teacher asks you what your mummy and daddy do for a living, you know we write BOOKS, don't you?").

Time to take him aside again. "You can't say bad things about President Mugabe," I tell him.
"Why?" "Because if people hear you, you could get into trouble." "But why can Chloe say it?"
"Because she lives in South Africa." Which will have to do, for now. But after reading South Africa's papers, I'm inclined to believe that Chloe's turn to watch every word may well come.

border

"I got here at 10 last night," the bus driver says.

It's four on a Thursday afternoon at Beitbridge border post, aka Hell. Three days ago South Africa abolished visas for Zimbabweans, offering them a three-month worker's permit on production of nothing more than a passport. Guess what? A few metres past the infamous bridge, hundreds of Zimbabweans -- 700?, 1000? -- are queuing.

We'd wondered what it would be like. Naively, we'd believed the Herald. "Subdued," the paper had said the traffic was. And it was... on the Zimbabwe side.

There are women sitting on the ground, huge carrier bags next to them. Others are texting madly. A young Chinese couple succumb to a "fixer". He sneaks them through to the courtyard of the immigration building, but no further. A white threesome in front of us are trying every 'phone contact they have.

"It's got to be someone reliable," the woman insists. She pulls out a novel. There are no toilets, no drinking water, nowhere to buy food: a recipe for cholera. "There's going to be riots soon," an elderly woman

My mother-in-law does not take to queues kindly (though she is from Zimbabwe, where I Q is a national obligation). She marches to a policeman, pleads seniority (she's 67) and smuggles all five of our passports to the desk. In three hours -- miracle of miracles -- we're through.

Less than a kilometre from the border post, we stop at a garage while our cellphones still have coverage. We buy ice-cream, magazines, fruit lollies, mineral water. And we turf in-laws and infant out of the car so we can scribble a script on the back of a medical letter and file, one last dispatch before two weeks of freedom: "There's chaos at Beitbridge border post as the buses keep rolling in..."

contrasts

The Club House is a colonial-era building with a wooden balcony and a turret. It stands on Mutare's main Herbert Chitepo Street where -- for a very short time in the early 1900s - a tram ran. The road is still wide enough for a wagon with horses to turn round in.

A friend has invited me for a "Ladies' lunch." In theory, only members can dine here. There are thick dove-grey carpets inside, tables set with starched white cloths, roses in vases. Gilt letters on a board record the names of past Club chairmen. On the menu are grilled pork chops and baked apples with custard.

"My father was a chief in the police force," says one dining companion. She means Rhodesian police force. "Female recruits had to have a cat and the cat had to sleep on each woman's bed."

"If an intruder broke in, you were supposed to throw the cat at it. They put out their claws instinctively."

"My father said it was the best form of security there was. "
....

"Mwana wako," the vendor shouts. For your child.

The stalls are built of rough wooden poles. It's best not to go shopping when it rains: the water collects in the tarpaulin and runs down shoppers necks as you stumble through the mud.

"Dollar, dollar, dollar."

Sakubva flea market in downtown Mutare was smashed up during the infamous slum clearances in 2005. But the stalls are back now. You have to pick your way through a pile of discarded rubbish to get to them.

"Dollar for two, dollar for two."

Vendors sit on the floor, piles of clothes heaped on to sheets of plastic. A few choice pieces hang on ancient wire hangers, ironed and washed. You pay more for those. The clothes are charity donations, smuggled in by the bale from neighbouring Mozambique.

Mimi, a stylish enterprising middle-aged black woman, has made a profitable business picking through Sakubva flea market. She selects pieces she knows will appeal to Borrowdale madams, washes them, irons them, affixes her own Mimi name tag, sets up a designer-style stall behind Sam Levy's village -- and sells them to clients who'd never dream of venturing to the flea market. Average cost of a blouse at Sakubva: 50 cents. Average cost of a blouse chez Mimi: 10 US.

That's called making a plan, Zimbabwe-style.