Directions to the rendezvous will be given at the last minute, says the voice at the other end of the line, lest the secret police are listening.
In these days of fuel shortages it is just a 15-minute drive from central Harare to the suburb where five polite young men, acting as sentinels, open the gates leading to a pink house.
Standing at the door of his study, a one-room cottage in the garden, is Morgan Tsvangirai, would-be president of Zimbabwe and nemesis of Robert Mugabe. He looks like his newspaper photographs: a bit crumpled, smiling and frowning at the same time.
A pumping handshake and he drops into an armchair, keen to discuss the fate of his country. What happens next — continued stalemate, a bloody uprising, a negotiated handover of power, fresh elections — hinges largely on him and the opposition group he leads, the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC).
The coming year, most analysts agree, is make-or-break. If Tsvangirai gets it right, Zimbabwe will have a ”soft landing” from 23 years of Mugabe rule.
If he gets it wrong, the country may go the way of Congo and pay in chaos and bloodshed, or choke in the tightened grip of the ruling Zanu-PF party. Tsvangirai knows it is his big test.
The 51-year-old knows many doubt he is up to the job, that maybe his personality and leadership skills are no match for the daunting task ahead, that he makes too many mistakes.
Rubbish, his supporters say. It is Tsvangirai who forged the MDC from a trade union base into a national movement and has withstood huge pressure to pose the most serious challenge Mugabe has known.
The MDC holds nearly half of the 120 elected seats in Parliament, controls the councils of nearly all the country’s urban areas and, according to most independent observers, would have won the 2002 presidential election had it been fair.
Despite the vote-rigging, violence and muzzling of independent media, the party is intact and respected.
”Morgan still commands a great degree of popular support and affection,” says one Western diplomat. But a growing number of critics say that this is not enough. People grow hungry, poor and destitute while the president’s cronies loot farms and state assets with no sign of a backlash.
Tsvangirai and his aides are accused of staying at home while sending supporters on to the streets to be beaten up. Some MDC activists complain of lost momentum, fatigue and disillusionment.
Sitting in an armchair, dressed in navy slacks and an African print shirt, Tsvangirai listens and shakes his head.
”Totally unjustified. You can’t have the leaders on the streets when nobody is there behind them,” he says.
Six months ago the nation heeded his call for a week-long general strike but declined to throng streets patrolled by the police, soldiers and Zanu-PF thugs.
”It’s easier for people to take the soft option and stay at home — and that’s disappointing.”
If they saw Tsvangirai and other leaders on the streets, might they not join them? They might, he concedes, but the leaders might also be arrested, decapitating the movement with barely an independent press left to report it.
Some observers think the risk justified. In his guerrilla days, Mugabe was incarcerated and his movement continued, so why not the MDC?
”The tragedy of the MDC is they want to behave like gentlemen when they’re in a war situation. They should make it impossible for Zanu, make noise, sing,” said Sam Nkomo, head of Associated Newspapers of Zimbabwe, the group which publishes The Daily News, a feisty critic that the regime tried to close earlier this year.
Nobody calls Tsvangirai a coward. He has been thrown into prison, been beaten unconscious and almost hurled from a 10-storey window. Now he is on trial for treason and could be executed. But critics say the movement’s morale and cohesion will falter unless it is bolder.
Asked about being a martyr if necessary, Tsvangirai, a father of six, dodges the question.
Pressed, he says: ”Yes, I think I’d be prepared to lay down my own life.”
What he does not add, though some aides do, is that the streets are not filling with critics.
”Maybe we’re still not desperate enough,” sighed one disillusioned MDC activist.
That thesis may soon be tested. Tsvangirai promised to create a ”broad alliance” with other pro-democracy organisations to ”intensify the pressure” on the regime in 2004. He declines to elaborate on tactics, but says the 79-year-old despot is on his way out, comparing him to Jim Jones, the cult leader who led a mass poisoning in the South American jungle in 1978.
”If a man wants to commit suicide, you can’t stop him.”
Tsvangirai left school early to work in a textile mill, then a mine, before working his way up the trade union movement. He never went to university — one of the reasons Mugabe, who reportedly has at least six degrees, is so disdainful.
Sometimes depicted as a firebrand who shoots from the hip, at one point in the interview he grows so animated he leaps to his feet, almost shouting. But Tsvangirai stays on-message, carefully wording, for example, his criticism of South Africa’s President Thabo Mbeki.
Many in the MDC despair that Mbeki, the one power broker with leverage over his wayward neighbour, cossets Mugabe. But Tsvangirai merely says the South African has been ”misled” and ”must be very disappointed” at Mugabe’s broken promises to ease repression.
Another fraught issue is whether the MDC is secretly negotiating with Zanu-PF. Opposition supporters in particular have been confused by contradictory signals from both sides.
”There are no talks. People must not misunderstand proximity contacts as talks. There have been no substantive talks,” says Tsvangirai.
Since the crackdown Zimbabweans seldom hear his voice or read his words, but if they did they may be surprised at how upbeat the opposition leader seems. — Guardian Unlimited Â