Hours earlier, dozens of heavily armed police demolished thousands of licensed market stalls in Zimbabwe’s second city — smashing, burning and seizing goods and arresting hundreds of vendors.

Like thousands of others in this devastated city, this woman has lost her wares and livelihood in one terrifying morning of destruction. “What can we do?” she asked despairingly.

Life savings have been reduced to black, acrid smoke rising in columns across the town. “That is how we get rent, that is how we get food,” she said.

Another woman vendor sits amid the twisted metal and cardboard wreckage with just a single bag of oranges on offer, desperate for a bus fare home.

Near by, a man retrieves some bunches from his cart of squashed bananas and is about to make a sale. Suddenly, a stampede down the street gives him the split-second warning he needs to flee as a police pick-up truck carrying eight officers swoops on to the scene.

My reflexes are slower, leaving me in the midst of the police as they jump from the truck, seize three women vendors and bundle them away.

For the rest of the day, those terrified vendors with anything left to sell hide behind cars and shopfronts, carrying only small samples of their wares.

Impassive gestures belie the frightened eyes and simmering anger of the Bulawayo traders, who use the Shona word “gukurahundi” to describe their plight. It means “the wind that sweeps away the chaff before the rain”, and was used to describe the genocidal terror overseen by President Mugabe to eliminate political opposition in the early 1980s.

Mr Mugabe’s North Korean-trained Fifth Brigade killed thousands of the minority Ndebele tribe that lives in the western Bulawayo region, and tortured many more.

David Coltart, legal affairs spokesman for the Movement for Democratic Change, said that the crackdown was reminiscent not only of Gukurahundi, but also of Apartheid, Pol Pot and the Nazis: “Police have used excessive, gratuitous force towards people going about their business lawfully and innocently and I have no doubt it’s a policy of retribution against people who are perceived correctly as being opposed to this fascist regime.”