SOUTH AFRICA: The human sea parted just enough to allow the presidential motorcade nudge its way into Zion City. The neatly-press faithful thronged the spiritual home of the Zion Christian Church - a small, picturesque town in Limpopo province - for Easter celebrations.
President Thabo Mbeki, who will be seeking their votes this week, joined the prayers.
The Zion church is South Africa's largest denomination. Its poor, black congregation shuns alcohol, cigarettes and pork; and reveres a bishop who performs "miracles" with Old Testament zeal. Yesterday over 100,000 crowded into the rural hamlet, the men in neat khaki uniforms, the women in girl-guide blue.
When Mr Mbeki climbed onto a balcony to speak, there was no talk of politics. Instead he simply prayed for a "free, fair and peaceful election".
The sprawling crowd, which spilled onto a nearby hill, murmured approval. Like much of Mr Mbeki's campaign, the moment was perfectly judged. On the eve of his second term of office, South Africans are discovering a new president. During his first five years, Mr Mbeki won plaudits abroad but suffered from a mixed reputation at home. Many South Africans respected his sharp intellect but found his personal style stiff, austere and inaccessible.
In the past month, however, the 61-year-old has finally found the common touch. Although his African National Congress (ANC) party is guaranteed an overwhelming majority in Wednesday's election - pollsters give it about two thirds of support - it has parried the small opposition threat with a nationwide house-to-house canvass. Mr Mbeki, who previously avoided glad-handling like a disease, has led the charge.
The president handed out leaflets at traffic lights and danced with gospel singers. He sat on township floors and toured white Afrikaner neighbourhoods to hear out complaints, sometimes popping in for tea and biscuits.
He ditched English for the vernacular to address rallies - even if it sometimes sparked sniggers when the words came out wrong.
The charm offensive has won Mr Mbeki rave reviews in the press, thrown the opposition off balance, and been a revelation to the South African electorate. The president himself also learned something. In an interview published yesterday he admitted he had not "realised the extent of poverty among the poor sections of the white community".
Of course the PR offensive may be just another election ploy. But many analysts sense a more fundamental change. In the early 1990s, Mr Mbeki returned home from decades of exile as a near stranger in his own country.
He had lost fluency in his native Xhosa language and developed slightly aristocratic tastes, such as drinking scotch and pipe- smoking.
Succeeding Nelson Mandela as president in 1999, he didn't bother trying to emulate his famous charisma and concentrated instead on building the nation. Soon he was seen as a cold fish, a man more worried by numbers than people.
His stubborn defiance of conventional wisdom on tackling the spiralling AIDS crisis exacerbated the reputation. This month's election has pierced that stiff, uncaring persona. The door-to-door campaign - boosted by support from the 1.2 million members of the trade union congress, COSATU - has reinforced the ANC's popularity and left the opposition in disarray.
Representatives of most major parties were on the church balcony beside Mr Mbeki in Zion City yesterday. None have come even close to threatening the ANC's election dominance.
The main opposition Democratic Alliance party has struggled to shake its image as a whites-only bastion. The Pan Africanist Congress (PAC), once a leading force in liberation politics, is scrabbling for a handful of seats.
And polls indicate that the New National Party - the former apartheid rulers - has suffered a steep slide in popularity in its Western Cape heartland, and faces an uncertain future.
"I think it's heading for the political wilderness," said Judith February, an analyst in Cape Town. The ANC monopoly on power is partly explained by the liberation dividend. The party is still cashing in on the gratitude of blacks for bringing a peaceful end to apartheid in historic elections a decade ago. Moreover since then the ANC has notched up a remarkable list of achievements - an end to political violence; economic growth, a model constitution; and housing, water and electricity for millions of township dwellers.
But the party has been unable to dent an unemployment rate of 40 per cent, and the younger generation is growing increasingly disillusioned. Tellingly, seven of the 27 million voters have not registered. Many are in their 20s.
Kamogelo Mafiri (25) stood in the front line of yesterday's throng in Moria.
The younger generation was "losing hope" with the ANC, he said. Many were too young to remember apartheid properly. "Now all we hear is empty promises," he said.