On April 18 1980, the last outpost of empire in Africa died. From Rhodesia's ashes rose a country that would take its place among the free nations as Zimbabwe, the last among equals. And men and women leapt to embrace this dream called Zimbabwe.
In the long war against the settler regime that preceded independence, the guerrillas kept up their morale by evoking this dream in song. Smith - just hit him on the head until he sees sense, dzamara taitonga Zimbabwe / until we rule a country called Zimbabwe. The struggle for Zimbabwe lit up the imagination of people around the world. In London, New York, Accra and Lagos, bell-bottomed men and women with big hair and towering platform shoes sang the dream of Zimbabwe in the words of the eponymous song by Bob Marley: Every man has the right to decide his own destiny. The dream of self-determination was realised in 1979 when the war ended and the green and white flag of the rebel colony was replaced by a flag of riotous colour and heartfelt, if cloying, symbolism.
That flag, raised by the country's first black prime minister, flew high. And with it the aspirations of its people, from the born-frees sucking in independent air to the rheumy-eyed men peering at independence through their cataracts. And the women - ululating, leaping, exploding with joy.
Almost 30 years later, Zimbabwe is still under the leadership of that first prime minister, now an octogenarian executive president with dyed hair, a glamorous wife and a stranglehold on power. The street vendors of Harare haggle over how many mita or bhidza, slang terms for million or billion, something costs. These vendors and their customers - and the 9 million people left in the country (three million have fled) - have been rendered criminals, for it is a crime now to buy anything at the non-gazetted prize, to change money on the parallel market, to "externalise" foreign currency.
It is hard to ignore the fact that there are still many who believe the ruling party line, that the current "challenges" are a necessary pain. So a few people die because there are no dialysis machines or surgical supplies; this is a small price to pay for consolidating the gains of the liberation struggle.
The millions who do not share this vision are considered puppets of foreign governments, and sellouts - not to mention inflated frogs, witches and two-headed creatures. For these millions, the dream of Zimbabwe has mutated into a nightmare of rampant inflation and shortages of everything: surgical gloves and surgeons, schoolbooks and schoolteachers, drugs and nurses. The only leaping that women do now is when they jump over potholes and pipes spewing waste on to the streets.
It is difficult to pinpoint when the political and economic decline began. Was it with the land reform programme? The war in Zaire? The unbudgeted payments to the former guerrillas? Did things start to go wrong when the United African National Council (UANC) and Zimbabwe African People's Union (Zapu), the only entities that could have formed the opposition to the ruling party, splintered and disappeared - with the latter being swallowed by the bloated leviathan that is now the ruling party? Did it all sour when the constitutional amendment in 1987 created an executive presidency with no accompanying strengthening of parliament and the judiciary?
Or was it in 2000, when the people delivered a vote of no confidence in the government by rejecting its sponsored constitution? Perhaps it was even before independence, when the guerrilla commanders adopted the methods of centralising control and stifling dissent used by Mao Zedong, later adding lessons from bosom pals of the struggle such as Nicolae Ceauçescu, the Butcher of Bucharest? Was it when they agreed with Kim Il-sung, the Great Leader and another friend of the liberation struggle, that there was nothing intrinsically wrong with personality cults in which children were taught praise poems to honour a single man, in which women flocked to the airport to welcome our homegrown Great Leader as he returned from his many trips, kneeling before him in the early dawn? Or did things first go wrong when the government tried to impose a one-party state? Did it have its origins back in the bush where the struggle was fought, when the talk was all of power and not democracy, control and not inclusiveness, and the liberation struggle was fought on tribal fronts?
The painful truth may be that Zimbabwe, the youngest of Africa's former colonies, has simply followed where the continent has led, treading the well-worn path beaten out of the lie that taking power from the colonialists and delivering democracy to the people are one and the same.
Saturday's election will give the country another chance to re-imagine the dream. And if it fails this time? Well, there will be the next election, and the election after that. It is no immediate comfort perhaps to the suffering, but nothing lasts forever. Ian Smith thought his Rhodesia would last 1,000 years: it lasted less than 15. This, too, shall pass, and when it does, women and men and children will again leap to embrace a dream called Zimbabwe.
Petina Gappah, a Zimbabwean writer and lawyer based in Geneva.