Twenty-one years after independence at the end of a bloody civil war and liberation from white minority rule, Zimbabwe is almost back where it started.
Its economy is in a state of collapse, and average real wages have slumped below the level of 1980. Unemployment is running at 40 per cent of the working population, at a conservative estimate. Three-quarters of the black population is living below the poverty line. Its hard-won institutions of democracy, its judiciary and its independent media are being treated with arrogant disregard by the government of President Robert Mugabe, the man who led the liberation struggle, and won the first independence elections.
Even the rhetoric of the war has returned to the propaganda arms of the government.
This time, of course, the government is black, and the white minority has largely joined forces with a growing black opposition. But the parallels between Mr Mugabe's Zimbabwe and the Rhodesia run by Mr Ian Smith, the former prime minister, are grimly apparent.
The campaign launched by the government to redistribute agricultural land by expropriating five to six million hectares of property owned by some 5,000 white farmers (without full cash compensation) is glorified in the state-owned media as the "Third Chimurenga" or liberation war.
"Zimbabwe is ours," says a senior member of the ruling Zanu-PF party's politburo and close confidant of Mr Mugabe. "We shall never give it up. If need be, we will go back to a peasant economy." That is a prospect regarded by Zimbabwe's neighbours in southern Africa, above all in South Africa, with deep foreboding. They fear a dramatic food shortage there towards the end of the year, and a potential exodus of population from border areas.
They are alarmed by Mr Mugabe's apparent disregard for the institutions of democracy and the rule of law. But they are also profoundly reluctant to intervene in the political problems of a neighbouring state, not least because it is locked in conflict over the explosive issue of land hunger.
South Africa faces the same pressure from its landless black population. So far, Pretoria has resisted pressure to intervene forcefully in Zimbabwe, preferring to stick to a policy of quiet diplomacy. Against charges of impotence in regional affairs, President Thabo Mbeki insists that South Africa's caution is because it cannot risk stoking up the crisis in its northern neighbour.
Mr Mbeki's biggest fear is an exodus of people from Zimbabwe. Another is that it might precipitate black land seizures from white farmers at home. Should the economy deteriorate further, South Africa would become the most likely destination for many starving black people and fleeing whites. Mr Essop Pahad, the South African minister of the presidency, says that white Zimbabweans would not leave Zimbabwe for Britain, but would want to settle in South Africa like many of their predecessors did after black majority rule in 1981.
While much international media attention has concentrated on the plight of those white farmers being attacked and driven from their land, it is the black majority in Zimbabwe that has suffered far more.
Per capita incomes today are lower than in the heyday of Mr Smith's white minority government in the early 1970s. Average real wages are lower than at independence, while between 125,000 and 150,000 jobs have been lost in the past 18 months. In July, the UN reported that Zimbabwe was one of just five countries in the world whose human development index measuring social and educational standards as well as prosperity was lower than in 1980.
It has the world's third highest adult infection rate of HIV-AIDS, at 25 per cent, and Mr Timothy Stamps, the Health Minister, says there will be zero population growth in 2002. Yet real spending on health will be down by a third this year with Zimbabwe's health delivery system being ranked bottom in a survey of 191 countries by the World Health Organisation. At the same time, the country is keeping 8,000 troops in the Democratic Republic of Congo, while promising to spend millions on land resettlement.
Inflation is running at an annual rate of 70 per cent, foreign investment and foreign aid have totally vanished, and the currency has collapsed. That is the background of economic chaos against which Mr Mugabe is gambling everything on re-election in March next year. His response has been to play simultaneously the land issue, and the race card. The government's entire political strategy hinges on exploiting the rural-urban divide. At last June's election, Zanu-PF was wiped out in urban constituencies by Mr Morgan Tsvangerai's trade union-backed Movement for Democratic Change.
Promises of free land with Z$15 billion (US$272 million) in handouts of seed, fertilizer, pesticides and farm implements to work the newly-allocated plots, cut little ice with urban voters.
One of the government's many worries is that even in rural areas the enthusiasm for land resettlement is less than wholehearted. For its land-for-votes strategy to have any chance at the polls in March, the government must get settlers onto the land in their thousands over the next few weeks in time to plant crops for 2002. But the land takeover is snared in legal tangles in the courts and there is no foreign currency to pay for farm inputs, such as fertiliser and machinery. This poorly-planned and underfunded experiment in social and economic engineering coincides with a growing food supply crisis.
In South Africa and in Zimbabwe the realisation is dawning that the political and economic crisis may come to a head much sooner. Then the international community will have to take a decision whether to rush aid to the country, even if it means bolstering Mr Mugabe's rule.
On the other hand, if the country does limp through to elections and Zanu-PF were to lose the poll, Vice-President Joseph Msika has warned of the consequences: the government supporters will "return to the bush" and resume "the liberation struggle".