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.