KEY POINTS:
The border post at Beitbridge is a crash course in the complexities of a country in freefall.
The town, such as it is, grew up around a bridge built across the Limpopo in 1920 by German mining tycoon Alfred Beit. Today it marks the border between Africa's largest
economy, South Africa, and its fastest shrinking one, Zimbabwe.
The traffic is almost all one way, backed up for hours waiting to cross south to where the money is.
Less than 2km north into Zimbabwe border the tarmac road becomes red dust. Developers have flanked the road with shining filling stations and supermarket with asphalt car parks. But it's all a charade. There is no petrol or diesel in the pumps. The car parks are empty.
In the supermarkets the aisles are full of produce but shoppers are few. Prices change hourly as inflation heads for 2000 per cent - to put that startling number into context, the next worst rate is Burma with 60 per cent.
Since the turn of the century, the country's once sophisticated economy has shrunk by half. The result is 80 per cent unemployment, and 85 per cent of the population live in poverty.
When, in 1980, Robert Mugabe won the first free elections in independent Zimbabwe, he was feted by Western liberals as a beacon of hope for Africa and hailed by his people as a liberator.
His early approach of soothing racial rivalries and respecting property rights encouraged many. But soon after taking power he launched a brutal pogrom, the Gukuruhundi, against the minority Ndebele people, killing 25,000.
Thousands of war veterans who had fought the white minority army led by Iain Smith were murdered.
By 1995, when Nelson Mandela came to Beitbridge to open a new bridge and salute the liberator, Mugabe's grip on power was starting to loosen. His strategy for holding on was to rip the country apart. Sensing that the only violent threat to his authority would come from war veterans disenchanted with their fate, he used racial, anti-imperialist rhetoric to unleash militias to take back the land from their "oppressors".
Scores of white farmers, and many thousands more black farm labourers, were intimidated and killed.
What had been dubbed the breadbasket of Africa was turned into a famine zone needing World Food Programme help.
What's left of Zimbabwe's real economy is in the teeming slums that surround the ghostly modern Beitbridge. Here everything is for sale.
Filthy single-storey brothels service the lorry drivers. No one is testing for HIV - they don't need to - the infection rates are near total.
Touts rush to open car windows offering petrol, hard currency, all the things that can be bought only on the black market.
In a world where paper money has almost no value, unless its South African rands, the system of barter has returned.
Because foreign currency reserves have collapsed, the regime has turned its attentions to squeezing the black market in search of the cash that it needs to survive.
This has meant giving the green light to unpaid police and security services to loot and extort the very street markets that people are using to survive.
All across the country homegrown maize and fruit are confiscated and distributed among regime loyalists.
Mugabe's spies are everywhere. The secret police of the Central Intelligence Organisation - plain clothes informants - are on the lookout for anyone who could pose a threat.
Every day at least 1000 people are bused from South Africa back into the country they are so desperate to escape. Most will try again. It is their only realistic chance for survival.
- Independent
