Every person in Zimbabwe, rich or poor, has a story of being undone by Mugabe. By 2007, inflation had wiped out everyone’s savings; people of all classes returned to zero, with a lucky few subsidized by relatives who had already fled abroad. It was a cultural revolution without a cultural project. Then, in 2009, the economy was “dollarized,” a recognition of the reality that most trade was happening in U.S. dollars anyway. Now all transactions occurred in dollars—ratty and brown from overuse—or in so-called Zimbabwean “bond notes,” which were supposed to be 1:1 with the dollar but were more like 1:1.3 because no one trusted the government backing the bonds.

It was strange to be in a country where the government had hated the United States but hungered after its currency. Columbus, for example, always paid for my expenses with his card and asked me to give him cash. A similar thing had happened over the years with cashiers in supermarkets and stores. As customers lined up, a relative of the cashier standing by would swipe his or her card on the customer’s behalf and pocket the cash. Supervisors got wind of this and started patrolling the cashiers. The supermarkets desperately needed dollars, too: It was how they paid for imports.

The cash shortage affected people in much more serious ways: Many were starving. Across from my hotel downtown, I had seen men and women sitting in the granite arcade between buildings, their knees covered with blankets, in what looked like the most linear sleepover in the world. I thought they were homeless. In fact, they were pensioners waiting overnight to receive their money from the National Building Society. Over three days, I watched the line swell from 15 to 54 to thousands. Many of the men and women hadn’t eaten in two days by the time they collected their paltry $15 (if that).

As for the truly indigent, the reason I didn’t see them in Harare proper was because they were sequestered in high-density “townships” at the edges of the city—vast shanties where the economy was entirely informal. From shacks made of wood and tarpaulin, people sold kitchenware, fertilizer, clothes, tires, vegetables, CDs—anything you could imagine. And because the townships didn’t vote for Mugabe, he had been particularly unkind to their residents. In 2005, he ordered the start of Operation Murambatsvina or “Move the Rubbish.” The slums were to be razed and cleared. Over half a million people were pushed out of livelihoods they barely inhabited in the first place. No alternatives were provided. Now, 13 years later, they were back in the townships. But they lived in fear. Even on my brief visit, I had seen pickup trucks full of cops and military police chasing away street vendors from downtown Harare.

People longed for economic change, and in his early days Mnangagwa said all the right things about the economy. One of his first moves was to reverse the Indigenization and Empowerment Act, which limited foreign investment in industries to 49 percent (investments in diamonds and platinum would still be limited). His Cabinet also tried to charm the rest of the world in order to have the sanctions lifted. At the end of a press conference, General Moyo—who was now foreign minister and dressed in a civilian suit—held on to the hand of the representative from the U.K., saying, “The diplomatic relationships that we once had, we should reestablish.” (Her response was cool: “Let’s discuss.”)

Perhaps this was only Zimbabwe’s Deng Xiaoping moment—a strongman opening up the economy but not people’s lives.

But one woman I met, who worked for an NGO and had spent a year in the Ministry of Finance, worried that the country’s liberalization could stop with economic reforms: “If people see quick wins on the economy, they will be confused, and they might decide, ‘Let’s just vote for him, we’re seeing results.’ There’ll be less emphasis on political rights.” It was plausible, then, that this was not the country’s democratic moment but its Deng Xiaoping moment—a strongman opening up the economy but not people’s lives.

Thirty-seven years of misrule by the ZANU-PF had made many citizens mistrustful. Peter, a 27-year-old who sold household goods out of a truck covered in photographs of various European soccer clubs, told me, “We’ll give Mnangagwa till May or June to see his focus, and if he doesn’t do anything we’ll kick him out.” But the question was: Would Mnangagwa or anyone in the ZANU-PF go willingly?

Mnangagwa came to power in 1980, as minister of state security under Mugabe. One of the first things he did was to visit the room with iron hooks where he had been tortured as a guerrilla; now the torturers worked for him. Since then, he had remained in power through a great deal of turmoil. As the former head of the CIO, he had overseen the Matabeleland massacres. Many considered him the chief election-rigger at the ZANU-PF.

A week into my visit, I went to have a look at Mnangagwa at the ZANU-PF’s Extraordinary Congress, the party’s convention for the July 2018 elections. The EOC was happening in Robert Mugabe Square, but otherwise all signs of Mnangagwa’s predecessor had been scrubbed clean. Instead, people wore jackets with Mnangagwa’s face on them, or Lacoste shirts and caps—the beginning of his cult of personality. A froggish man with small eyes, a big nose, and a gap in his front teeth, he arrived in a motorcade of 16 vehicles led by three motorcycles with flashing lights. Astonishingly, for a party used to Mugabe’s kingly delays, he was almost on time. Wearing a green cap, a black tie, and a jungle-decorated jacket with his own face emblazoned on the sleeves, back, and flaps, he walked to a small fenced-in area within the crowd and cut a green ribbon and planted a ceremonial tree. Then he was escorted inside for a day of speeches.

The EOC is always a huge spectacle, with about 5,000 party volunteers sitting under an extra-long white tent, but this was the most extraordinary one yet, because it was the first without Mugabe. Party apparatchiks took the stage pledging loyalty to Mnangagwa and denouncing the “G40 cabal” and even, more controversially, Mugabe. But the old leader still hovered above their heads and in their minds. Once or twice, while leading a cheer, a speaker said, “Forward with Mug ...,” only to stop himself as the audience hooted and laughed. Of course, these crowds had pledged undying allegiance to Mugabe, too, only weeks before. A dictatorship compromises everyone.

Mugabe’s voice did not undo the effect of his authority: Authority has its own music, disconnected from thought or language.

Finally, Mnangagwa rose to speak. After musically leading the crowds in chants, he said, “The first lady, Comrade … uh.” He broke into a boyish grin. This sly reference to Grace elicited even bigger laughter. The comic pause, right at the start of his speech, was the best part of his performance. Mnangagwa, unlike Mugabe, is not a hypnotic speaker. Mugabe’s power rested on his elaborately drawn-out words, his odd pauses, his British locution, his Savile Row suits with their matching ties and pocket squares. He was thin, and his voice always carried an edge of mockery. He sounded like someone sucking each word to savor it for the first time (“immoral” becomes “eeemoral”), though this did not undo the general effect of his authority: Authority has its own music, disconnected from thought or language. I remember watching a recording of his 1980 acceptance speech—where he pledged reconciliation and asked the citizens to beat “swords into plowshares”—and being moved to tears. This September, two months before the coup, he had given a similarly masterful performance at the U.N. General Assembly. He was 93 and could barely walk but had arranged his path to the podium in such a manner that he would never have to lean on another human being. Instead he put one hand on the wall to rest and continued his amble to the stage. And when he spoke, the Naipaulian-Nehruvian radio announcer’s voice was still there.

“It is axiomatic that we must harvest what we sow,” he said. “Yet by some strange logic we expect to reap peace—reap peace when we invest and expend so much treasure and technology in war.” He hit his usual high notes about colonialism. And then he mentioned a certain country that was withdrawing from the Paris Climate Agreement. “And that’s”—he let out an almost inaudible schoolteacherly sigh—“the United States. The great United States. Mr. Trump’s United States.” Peals of laughter came back from the crowd. “Are we having the return of a Goliath to our midst who threatens the extinction of other countries?” he asked. “And may I say to the United States president, Mr. Trump, please blow your trumpet—blow your trumpet in a musical way toward the values of unity, peace, cooperation, togetherness, dialogue, which we have always stood for.”

The General Assembly erupted in laughter and applause. A young Zimbabwean woman sitting next to me who had criticized Mugabe just moments earlier (“He’s the one who’s asleep. That’s how you know it’s Mugabe,” she had told me when I asked which of the Zimbabwean delegates was him), was clapping too. I was clapping.

Mnangagwa possessed no such powers. His voice sounded like wind in a steel tumbler: metallic, hollow, rising and falling without logic, almost unintelligible. To me his speech seemed like a round-robin of banalities, but the Zimbabwe journalists sitting on the floor with me before the dais interpreted it in the light of what had come before. They latched on to what was new—what would have been unthinkable under Mugabe.

“We must always be mindful that no party,” Mnangagwa said, “however rich its past, has a divine right to govern.” He stressed that his “ascendency to the helm of the party” did not “mean the defeat of one faction and installation of another” or “the rise in fortunes of any particular region, tribe, or totem.” He was, he said, “a president for all, men and women, the young and old, rich and poor, and the well and the sick.”

The positivity—the lack of viciousness—of the speech made it exceptional. Notable, too, was the lack of extensive flattery from the other speakers. Mugabe, I was told, had loved to hear people talking about him. And not only had the EOC unfolded more or less on time, but it had been slashed to one day instead of the expensive week of speechifying, dancing, and revelry. This was, as it were, a military operation. General Chiwenga sat just to the left of the stage. I was only a few feet in front of him, almost at his feet, and I watched the general, in his black suit, jiggle his legs restlessly. He didn’t have a role today.

The function was supposed to climax in the announcement of the two vice presidents, the next in line for the throne (would they include General Chiwenga?), but here Mnangagwa threw a curveball. “I’m delaying the appointment of these two for perhaps another few days,” he said. A pall of dismay fell over the crowd; the journalists practically put their pens away. “Disappointed?” Mnangagwa said, smiling slightly. Then the speculation began. Was it because the military now controlled Mnangagwa? Or were characters like Chiwenga still deciding whether to shed their military uniforms and enter the world of politics?