Africa Is Changing, But Not Zimbabwe; Madhuku is the only man to have beaten Mugabe.(pro-democracy activist Lovemore Madhuku)

Byline: Peter Godwin (Godwin is the author of a memoir, "Mukiwa--A White Boy in Africa.")

A month or so ago I found myself at a dinner in a New York loft with Lovemore Madhuku, a Zimbabwean pro-democracy activist (and head of the National Constitutional Assembly), who was here to collect the prestigious Northcote Parkinson Civil Courage Prize "for steadfast resistance to evil at great personal risk." He and I share a common background. Both Zimbabweans, one black and one white, we grew up in the eastern highlands there, on the border with Mozambique. Both of us went to Cambridge University in England to study law.

Madhuku is a slight, straight-backed man in his mid-30s, softly spoken and self-effacing. He sat silently, smiling, while various guests debated the conduct of the recent U.S. elections. One guest, annoyed at having recently been stopped by police for bicycling the wrong way around Washington Square Park, lamented that America was becoming a police state. "Have you ever been arrested?" our hostess asked Madhuku, trying to coax him into the conversation. He cocked his head and thought for a moment. "Eleven--no, 12 times." Several resulted in torture. After the last one he was so badly beaten by pro-government thugs that he was left in the bush for dead. The table fell silent.

Madhuku is no firebrand. He is a law professor at the University of Zimbabwe who happens to believe in the transforming benefits of representative government. But as such he's considered a mortal threat to the 25-year regime of Zimbabwe's aged president, Robert Mugabe. Next week Zimbabwe goes to the polls. But if it were up to Madhuku, democratic agitator that he is, the main opposition party, the Movement for Democratic Change, would boycott the ballot, so grotesquely skewed is the electoral playing field. Zimbabwe enjoys almost none of the freedoms necessary for meaningful elections; it doesn't have freedom of the press, of assembly, of movement.

Madhuku is the only man ever to have beaten Mugabe at the polls. It was a 2000 referendum to increase presidential term limits--and Mugabe, free from opposition for years, was caught off guard when the country voted against him, at the urging of the National Constitutional Assembly. Soon after, Mugabe ordered the seizure of commercial farms, and agricultural production collapsed. Hyperinflation, the flight of foreign capital, the collapse of infrastructure, in fact the world's fastest-shrinking economy: these are now the headlines of Mugabe's management ...