Fear and terror stalk Zimbabwe, for the worst is yet to come

The terror is widespread and escalating. Yet the man who is responsible is still free to travel to international conferences

Africa had a new beginning this week. At least that is what the leaders who gathered in Durban would like us to believe. A new beginning under the grand title of the African Union. I would have been tempted to treat it as something other than a bad joke were it not for the agenda and the invitation list.

A simple question to start with. What is the biggest political crisis in Africa just now? The escalating hunger and violence in Zimbabwe. What wasn't on the agenda at the launch of the African Union? You guessed it. Zimbabwe. But who was an honoured guest at the big expensive launch? Of all people Robert Gabriel Mugabe.

While Comrade Robert was in Durban I was in Zimbabwe posing as a tourist. I don't like creeping around countries pretending to be a tourist. I would much rather do my job of reporting in an open and straightforward manner. But openness is like cyanide to Mr Mugabe's government. He has employed as his Minister of Information one of the greatest enemies of the free press anywhere in the world. Jonathan Moyo is the architect of press laws which can see journalists sent to jail for up to two years; after my last secret visit to Zimbabwe he denounced me as no better than a terrorist and warned that if I came back I might not leave the country for a long time.

I travelled with Marie, a South African who'd been part of the struggle against apartheid in the old days. In a way that she had never experienced in South Africa she felt the full power of racial hostility. We'd pulled up to get petrol, unfortunately not noticing the truckload of Zanu-PF activists just ahead of us in the queue. When the attendant came to serve us, the men and women on the back of the truck erupted in an angry tirade. It was bitterness of a kind I'd never experienced before anywhere in Africa. We quickly drove away to another petrol station across the road. With the car filled we prepared to drive away. But the engine wouldn't start. We tried. And tried again. Nothing but a dry asthmatic wheeze from under the bonnet.

Marie conjured up a driver willing to take us towards Karoi on the main road to Lake Kariba and the Zambian border. We passed once-thriving fields in which the weeds were starting to blossom; the withered stalks of maize plants trembled in the breeze, like strips of rags. In a few fields there were cattle, but Zimbabwe's herds are being slaughtered. The farmers have no intention of leaving them to the war veterans.

Chris Shepard lives at the end of a long dirt road, in a large white house surrounded by flame-trees and poplars and with a huge baobab dominating the garden. His four youngsters, three girls and a boy all under 10, raced around the garden. Chris Shepard and his wife Elle have been given until 10 August to vacate their farm. When they go, the 146 people working on the farm will lose their jobs. More than 100 have already been let go – that thanks to more than five invasions by so-called war veterans intent on stopping agricultural production.

Chris Shepard told me he was determined to stay on. Yet his wife Elle admits that there are moments when the fear about what might happen is heart-stopping. Eleven farmers have already been murdered. The police are either complicit in the terror or refuse to impose the law; more often than not it is a combination of both. I ask you to try to imagine what it is like to live on those farms, to be awake at night when your children have fallen asleep and to listen for every noise in the darkness outside. How it feels when the dogs begin to bark, when a car drives up to the gate and then turns away, the lights playing across the windows at the front of the house. And nobody to call to for help.

Or try to imagine what it is like to be among the poorest of the poor and to wake in the middle of the night to find the war veterans smashing through the door. To be a woman like Christine whom I met at a camp in the bush for displaced persons: that term "displaced" – so civilised, so clean a word for the terror imposed by Robert Mugabe's thugs. She is the mother of a three-month-old baby and with her husband she lives in a tent donated by a local aid agency. There is little food or medical help; children in the rest of the camp have been sick with diarrhoea and chest infections.

Christine was gang-raped by members of Robert Mugabe's militia. She lived with her husband on a farm and she was seized when the militia came shortly after the presidential elections. Seven men took turns to rape the young mother. In the course of the ordeal she fainted. When she woke the rapists had gone but she was unable to find her child. Eventually some neighbours located the baby and brought it to her; bruised and bleeding the young mother held her infant close.

An isolated case? Not at all. If you can't personally listen to the testimonies of the victims, read the reports of human rights groups. The terror is widespread and escalating. Yet the man who is ultimately responsible, Robert Mugabe, is still free to travel to international conferences. Indeed he recently spoke about children's rights at major event organised by the United Nations. He was an honoured guest at the inaugural meeting of the African Union in Durban earlier this week.

There is no political will – in Africa, or Europe or America – to put Zimbabwe at the top of the agenda. The western political establishment sighs and feels it has done its best. The Africans refuse every opportunity to show Mr Mugabe that his kind of government has no place in the reborn continent of which South Africa's President, Thabo Mbeki, repeatedly speaks.

There is wind and waffle but Robert Mugabe, the toughest and shrewdest African leader of his generation, knows he is winning. For now at least. But there will come a point – it comes in the life of every tyranny – when the people will lose their fear. Hungry, desperate and angry, they will no longer bow down in the face of the guns and the secret policemen. It happened in South Africa when the students revolted in 1976 and began the process which would destroy apartheid. How long will it take in Zimbabwe? I really don't know.

I left the country with a feeling that I knew well from the old days in South Africa. Fear for the future. Real fear. For I believe the worst is yet to come.

Standing safely in South Africa, and watching the dusk creep down over the Limpopo River I felt a surge of sadness: sadness for the people I'd met on the other side – the human rights activists in Harare, for Christine and her child, for the labourers driven off the land, Chris Shepard and his family waiting to lose everything. As the Afrikaner writer Andre Brink wrote in 1976, the struggle against oppression was "not a question of imagination but of faith". For Zimbabweans – all of them, black and white – it is such a long journey ahead. Not a question of imagination, but of faith.

The writer is a BBC Special Correspondent