In their front room, 200m from Gwanzura stadium, the Matizas could just hear President Robert Mugabe vow that he would never allow the opposition to take power.
For the eight members of the family, Mugabe’s threats during his Independence Day speech last Friday had special meaning.
A week earlier Patrick, a 26-year-old Movement for Democratic Change activist and English teacher in Mutoko, north-east of Harare, was dragged from his home at night and beaten to within an inch of his life.
Easing back on to a mat, spluttering and cursing, he is as bitter as the medicine he has to take.
With two other teachers, he was marched off to his Zanu-PF assailants’ offices, where they kept the trio for two days and took turns beating them.
They were then dumped by the roadside, where they were found and taken to a clinic. “But we were followed there. The nurses were beaten up and ordered not to treat us.”
Patrick received treatment only when his uncle convinced a friend to drive him to Harare.
He is yet to learn the fate of his two colleagues. “I am very angry. But what can I do?”
According to rights groups, Patrick is one of more than 20 people who have been beaten and displaced from their homes since Mugabe’s defeat in the elections.
The doctors report that a third of the patients they have treated are women. Some of the victims sustained injuries that could lead to permanent disability.
Asked about pictures rights groups say are evidence of beatings, Justice Minister Patrick Chinamasa told journalists: “They are showing us pictures from 2000 and 2002.”
Care workers in Harare and other urban centres are setting up safe houses to accommodate people fleeing their rural homes. In one of these havens MDC activist Alexander from Uzumba, a fiercely Zanu-PF area north of Harare, told the Mail & Guardian how he had suffered for days in a torture camp.
“They used a specially made whip — a small iron rod with wire at the end. They whipped me all over the body, but they targeted the soles of my feet until they bled. Then they ordered me to run to Karimbika (a business centre 5km away).
“All this time, my hands were tied with wire behind my back.”
Another villager, from Murehwa, north of Harare, told how a man in army uniform beat him for more than an hour and then ordered one of his colleagues to hand him a castrating machine used for bulls.
“I was lucky,” said the man, who identified himself only as Farai. “Someone in the village had borrowed the pliers.”
Stella Gatsi (51), said she was forced to watch as Zanu-PF militants burned down her home in Mutoko. Her son, Livingstone, had stood for the MDC as a councillor in the elections.
Some of the reported acts of violence are “sadistic”, said one doctor. She said one of her patients told her the militia had gouged out the eyes of three of his goats before ordering his entire family to strip naked. “They were then ordered to lie on concrete slabs and beaten,” the doctor said.
This week Zimbabwean churches broke their silence. “Organised violence perpetrated against individuals, families and communities who are accused of campaigning or voting for the ‘wrong’ political party … has been unleashed throughout the country, particularly in the countryside and in some townships. People are being tortured, abducted and humiliated,” a coalition of the main church groups said.
The churches said villagers are being force-marched to “mass meetings” and forced to chant Zanu-PF slogans and renounce the MDC.
Saying “a pall of despondency hangs over the nation”, the church leaders gave a stark warning: “We warn the world that if nothing is done to help the people of Zimbabwe in their predicament, we shall soon be witnessing genocide.”