 Tonderai Ndira had been arrested by Robert Mugabe’s thugs for the 35th time. But his family knew that, this time, they wouldn’t bother with torture and interrogation.
Zanu-PF had tried everything to silence the tall, 33-year-old activist.
Last year, a Harare judge found that police had framed Ndira  advance team leader for Morgan Tsvangirai  with a bogus petrol-bombing charge, on which he was imprisoned for five months.
Twice, he reportedly leapt from moving vehicles to escape interrogation by armed Zanu supporters.
Once, it seemed a drunken, armed policeman was sure to shoot him dead on the spot in a bar when Ndira  enraged at the policeman’s public gloating over the murder of Ndira’s friend  hurled a beer bottle at his head. Instead, the pub crowd drew courage from the stance of their iconic street leader and chased the policeman all the way to his station.
A week before his arrest, he defied an order to report to the local police station, saying: Look, I’m very busy  I’ll come see you next Friday.
Finally, days later, they killed his friend and former cellmate, Beta Texas Chokururama, by stabbing and shooting him, having already broken both his legs just three weeks before, in the clearest possible message to Ndira and other activists to stop campaigning for the June 27 run- off elections.
He wouldn’t stop. In fact, friends said he couldn’t: this was a man who not only encouraged Zimbabweans to fight back against raids by war veterans and Zanu PF thugs, he was once seen throwing stones at those running away from a fight.
Instead, Ndira brazenly broke cover the day before his arrest: leaving his Movement for Democratic Change safe house and visiting his wife and two children in the Harare slum of Mabvuku where he’d lived all his life.
It was thought  and hoped  that Ndira was so well known, and so well loved, that Mugabe’s Joint Operational Command (JOC) could never sanction his assassination.
But when six armed men arrived at his house on May 14, his wife, Plaxedess Mutariswa, thought something was different from all the other times; something was wrong.
And she knew it when she saw the men kneeling on Ndira’s back inside their vehicle, lifting his chin and smothering him before they’d even left the scene.
So Ndira’s younger brother, Barnabas, simply began a search for his body the next day.
His search would accidentally unearth eight other newly murdered activists, or suspected activists, in a single week. It would provide the first evidence of election death squads in Zimbabwe.
Last Wednesday, Barnabas set out for Murehwa mortuary in his old Mazda 323, where he’d heard two unclaimed, murdered bodies had been dumped. Neither was Tonderai.
On Thursday, he headed for Goromanzi  Zimbabwe’s Vlakplaas -style torture centre  and found the body of another MDC activist. But it was a woman.
Everywhere we went, we were discovering new bodies, all unidentified, Barnabas said. Where we thought we knew the person, we contacted families and suggested they go that particular mortuary. By the end of the week, I think people were fearful of hearing from us.
On Saturday, hope flared at a hospital in the northern town of Centenary he visited, when he heard four brutally beaten MDC activists were still alive and receiving treatment. None was his brother  and neither was a fifth MDC supporter who lay dead, murdered, in the mortuary downstairs.
On Monday, he thought he’d finally found him, when, travelling toward Marondera, he learnt from a policeman that two senior activists had been killed and dumped in bushes on a farm.
One, he realized, was street activist Cain Nyeve. The policeman described the stylish, oversized belt on the other body. Barnabas knew it well, and said it belonged to his friend, MDC activist Godfrey Kauzani; but not his brother.
But Barnabas was called back the next day by a sympathetic policeman: yet another body had been found on the farm, so decomposed and degraded by insects as to be unrecognisable. But the body was as tall as Tonderai.
Barnabas sent his father to Harare’s Parirenyatwa Hospital to check. He couldn’t tell.
I couldn’t go in myself, so I sent two friends, said Barnabas. The body had this rubber bangle, which my dad hasn’t seen before  he’s been living in the rural areas for a long time. But it was his, and it was him.
Tonderai had finally been assassinated: the 40th MDC activist or suspected activist to be killed since Zimbabwe’s elections on March 29.
Another five have since been murdered as a brazen political assassination campaign gathers pace ahead of the June 27 runoff election.
A state hospital death certificate found no cause of death, in keeping with a practice described this month by the Solidarity Peace Trust report on election violence: In some hospitals where the dead have arrived beaten and mutilated, brave doctors are filling in death certificates accurately, stating injuries and cause of death, but in other cases, bodies are buried without identification.
But Ndira was the face of Zimbabwe’s election dead, and the world had to know. Family friends secured a court order for a private autopsy, and flew a private forensic pathologist from Durban to conduct it.
The pathologist  who asked not to be named  told the Sunday Times: It was clear that he died very soon after he was abducted.
However, the pathologist also dismissed widespread rumours of gruesome torture: I was able to exclude any protracted beating.
His report is yet to be finalised.
But the Sunday Times understands that the autopsy evidence was consistent with a killing technique in which a victim’s neck is pried backwards and his airway blocked.
The murder cover-up prompted a fresh wave of comparisons to South Africa’s harassed and murdered struggle hero Steve Biko.
One friend, Jack, said: He never wanted position for himself; he spent years making people aware of the injustice around them, and he fought for them. He was becoming our Biko, and Mugabe knew it.
Another friend, Reuben Tichareva, told Canada’s Globe & Mail: We called him our Steve Biko.
Even as the autopsy was being conducted last Sunday, the murdered body of yet another activist, Shepherd Jani, was found.
One senior MDC official told the Sunday Times: What the brother found in his search confirms what we had feared. The assassinations of Texas and Tonderai, in particular, mark a major shift in Zanu’s tactics.
We believe death squads are now being employed to decimate  even exterminate  the ranks of our most dedicated organisers and activists.
Ndira grew up in a poor household of five children. Friends said that, even as a pupil at Mabvuku Primary, he protected girls from the taunting of bullying boys. But he recruited even the boys he’d chastised into neighbourhood soccer teams.
Despite an intellect that one friend claimed would have made him an excellent judge, if he’d wanted it, he dropped out of school at 16 to become independent, working as a labourer.
He was first arrested in 1998 as a community activist, concerned more about service delivery than national politics.
Within a year, he would become a founder member of the MDC, having cajoled key trade union members to attend the very first meeting of the People’s Convention in 1999.
In 2000, he led a counter-attack of farm labourers against invading war veterans, earning himself the attention of the Central Intelligence Organisation for the first time.
Ndira had been elevated to a regional security secretary for the MDC by the time of his death. But his primary role was to rally the crowds  going door to door  ahead of campaign visits by Tsvangirai, and turning ordinary voters into recruits for the cause, earning him the nickname Serge (the local spelling of sarge, short for sergeant).
One fellow activist, Jack, said: Tonderai would recruit people standing in queues to become activists; he’d recruit petty criminals sharing his jail cell  he never stopped. He must have personally recruited hundreds.
He was a loyal cadre, but he would never hesitate to argue a point with Morgan, and Morgan would always agree to meetings with him.
Sources told the Sunday Times that Tsvangirai timed his visit to Zimbabwe last weekend specifically to attend Ndira’s funeral, in defiance of warnings about his own safety.
Friends said Ndira’s only escapes from his personal war against oppression were the love of his children, Raphael, 10, and Linity, 7, and a Rastafarian devotion to ganja.
Ndira was arrested so often that his dreadlocks never had the chance to grow.
In 2002, he told the BBC: We are prepared to die. It is just the same, we are still dying in Zimbabwe. We are dying by hunger, by diseases, everything, so there is nothing to fear, nothing to (be) scared (of).
Now as a martyr, friends said, Serge would rally whole battalions of Harare citizens from the grave.
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