For more than five hours on the afternoon of April 4 the man who sees himself as synonymous with the destiny of Zimbabwe, and who has made himself the country’s dictator to ensure it, remained locked in a meeting in Harare, the capital, with his four-dozen-member politburo. The man was Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwe’s president, and the session was taking place in the upper reaches of the ruling party’s headquarters, Jongwe House. Everyone in Harare knew that Mugabe had to be up there; the soldiers of his presidential guard were still lolling around outside, in their distinctive gold berets.

Mugabe was chairing the meeting himself, in a dark suit and polka-dotted tie. On Mugabe’s flanks were the men and women who fought victoriously with him 28 years ago to transform white-ruled Rhodesia into black-ruled Zimbabwe. Now, six days after elections for parliament and president, this group was facing certain defeat. Although the government had not yet officially announced the results, and despite strenuous efforts to rig the election, it was clear that Mugabe’s zanu-P.F. party had lost not only its parliamentary majority but the presidency as well. The purpose of the meeting was to decide whether to accept the loss gracefully and relinquish power to Mugabe’s bitter rival, the Movement for Democratic Change (M.D.C.), led by Morgan Tsvangirai (pronounced Chahn-gur-eye), or to fight on, manipulating the results so as to force a second round of voting for the presidency.

Mugabe’s party is divided now between hawks and doves, between hard-liners and conciliators, and it is riven as well by rival succession candidates. Mugabe’s clan totem is Gushungo—meaning “crocodile” in Shona, the language of most Zimbabweans—and on the occasion of his 83rd birthday, last year, a giant stuffed crocodile was presented to him as a symbol of his “majestic authority.” But even the wiliest crocodiles eventually tire and die, and the word on the street was that he had been stung by the extent of his defeat, and that his young wife, Grace, had urged him to step down and enjoy his last years with their three children in his 25-bedroom mansion. The mood in Harare was expectant, even giddy.

I grew up and was educated in Zimbabwe, served as a conscript, and maintain close ties to the country. Because of these roots I have been able to live and travel there even at times, such as the present, when other foreign journalists have been expelled. In Harare that afternoon I spent time with friends as the hours wore on. Finally an old school chum called to say that “the General”—his uncle, a politburo member and a former guerrilla commander—had at last emerged from Jongwe House, and that the meeting was over.

The General, Solomon Mujuru, is now considered a “moderate,” but he was not ever thus. Twenty-five years ago, not long after the end of the war of liberation, the General had once put a gun to my heart and threatened to kill me. The gun was a Russian-made Tokarev with a mother-of-pearl handle. Odd how you remember such details. The General had been working his way through a bottle of Johnnie Walker Red Label at the time, but his grip was steady.

This was in 1984, during the Matabeleland massacres, when Mugabe unleashed his fearsome North Korea–trained Fifth Brigade into that southern province to crush the opposition. I had written about the massacres for a British newspaper, which is what prompted the General to draw his gun when our paths crossed.

But now, on April 4, the General had bad news to report. In the end Mugabe had decided that he intended to do everything necessary to retain his powers. Behind the scenes the presidential ballot boxes would be effectively stuffed to indicate that Morgan Tsvangirai, though still winning more votes than Mugabe, had not achieved the 50 percent threshold necessary for election. (This was possible because there had been a third candidate in the race.) Further, in the weeks leading up to the runoff, Mugabe would wage a campaign of bloody intimidation to ensure that Zimbabwe’s voters understood where their self-interest lay. Indeed, a secret battle plan was actually drawn up, in detail. A leaked copy dated April 9 was shown to me; the key section carried the heading “Covert Operations to Decompose the Opposition.”