When Zimbabwe's opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) party was launched 100 kilometers away from the capital, Harare, in the small farming town of Banket in Mashonaland West district in September 1999, Zimbabwe was gripped by a fever.
Nothing like it had happened since the demise of previous attempts at opposition politics like the Zimbabwe Unity Movement in 1990, the Forum Party of Zimbabwe three years later and the Zimbabwe Union of Democrats in 1995.
The MDC launch was attended by hundreds of white commercial farmers from across the country, but especially Mashonaland West province, the grain heartland. This was unprecedented in the politics of Zimbabwe where whites had always taken a back seat, preferring instead to focus on the engine of the economy - farming.
The MDC leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, had become a hero, easily rivaling President Robert Mugabe, after he led demonstrations, as secretary-general of the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions, in 1998 for electoral reform and against soaring food prices and unpopular tax increases. The government was forced to backtrack on its proposed tax hikes.
The MDC's instant popularity was on the back of protest against economic decline which had caused massive job losses for workers who constituted the backbone of Tsvangirai's labor movement. The ruling ZANU PF party was blamed for precipitating the decline and being unable to halt it. People were in a mood for a revolt and the MDC provided an immediate outlet.
It was also fortuitous that the formation of the MDC coincided with the launch of the independent and highly professional Daily News as the main challenge to government's media monopoly. The Daily News quickly became the voice of the opposition. Through the newspaper's columns, the MDC was able to marshal support against a proposed new constitution which, according to its opponents, conferred too much power on Mugabe and legitimized the seizure of white commercial farms without compensation.
The proposed constitution was overwhelmingly rejected in a referendum in February 2000 and Tsvangirai grew in stature. The MDC was on a roll. Mugabe's black opponents and whites alike were ecstatic. Mugabe was stunned. It was the first time in twenty years that he had been defeated in a popular vote. He acknowledged the defeat in a terse statement on national television and said people "had exercised their democratic right."
"The world now knows Zimbabwe as that country where opposing views can file so singly and so peacefully to and from the booth without incident […]. May I also make special mention of the white part of our community who this time around sloughed off apathy to participate vigorously in the whole poll," he went on.
But veteran Africa foreign correspondent Martin Meredith, now a fellow at St Anthony's College, Oxford, noted in Robert Mugabe: Power, Plunder and Tyranny in Zimbabwe, his biography of Zimbabwe's head of state, "These fine words concealed an inner rage at what had happened.
"Mugabe attributed his defeat principally to the whites and was determined to make them pay for it. At an emergency meeting of ZANU PF's central committee on 18 February, three days after the results of the referendum were announced, there were recriminations all round. The ruling elite had suddenly seen their grip on power slipping and with it all the wealth, the salaries, the perks, contracts, commissions and scams they had enjoyed for twenty years."
In that apparent referendum success also lay the source of the MDC's future destruction and its current malaise.
What followed was a catastrophe beyond everybody's imagination which blighted Zimbabwe's human rights record and led to the country's economic collapse and current pariah status in the international community.
Mugabe launched a brutal campaign of terror across the country that only the Ndebele people of Matabel
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