THE skies in Zimbabwe transfix me. Perhaps it has something to do with being in the Southern hemisphere, but for whatever reason, they almost always seem bigger, wider and more dramatic than normal skies. They appear to envelop the landscape in one vast panoramic vista – the clouds making it impossible not to believe that what you are seeing is a range of gigantic encircling mountains.

The best part of a decade ago when I first came to Zimbabwe, big African storm clouds, bruised, fat and tumbling, hovered for days over the capital Harare like some ominous portent of things to come. Those were not good times in Zimbabwe, not that the country has had much to be happy about these past 40 years.

Back then, in 2009, as the sky glowered down on this troubled land, I found myself standing one afternoon on heaps of terracotta-coloured earth in the ramshackle cemetery of an impoverished township just east of Harare.

“Rain will come soon,” Elijah Nyekete the resident gravedigger told me, glancing upwards, before swinging a pickaxe above his head and plunging it into the red clay soil at his feet. He then paused briefly, his chest heaving like a spent swimmer’s from the exertion, before starting to speak again.

“The downpours cause problems,” he continued. “It washes away markers, making it difficult for people to find the exact location where their loved ones lie.”

Puzzled by the peculiar range of objects adorning the mounds of earth on the graves that surrounded us, I asked about their significance.

“It’s our custom, Elijah said. “If, like me, you’re fond of boozing beer then we put bottles; if you enjoyed growing things, then maybe a plant; or if you were perhaps a prostitute during your life perhaps we will place condoms on the grave.”

To one side of where he was digging stood a row of newly dug plots, the graves almost shoulder deep. In the days just before I’d come here to the cemetery, as many as 30 other plots had been filled with bodies of those who had died from the cholera that swept the district.

Back then the disease, like the economic collapse, hunger and political oppression that had ravaged Zimbabwe, were just another nail in the coffin for a country once the envy of its neighbours and the breadbasket of sub-Saharan Africa.

This was four months on from when Robert Mugabe, the president at the time, had declared there was “no cholera” in Zimbabwe and that the country’s health crisis was effectively over.

For going on 37 years Mugabe ruled Zimbabwe with an iron grip, the only leader this southern African nation has known since independence almost four decades ago. Then last November the Mugabe era finally came to an end after he was unseated and replaced as president by fellow Zanu-PF party member Emmerson Dambudzo Mnangagwaor or “ED” as he is more commonly known here.

For some, Mugabe’s ousting was little more than a military coup, while for others including the African Union (AU), it was described as the “legitimate expression of the will of the Zimbabwean people.”

Whatever interpretation is put on the events of last November, for most Zimbabweans Mugabe’s departure from the presidency brings hope this is the beginning of a new political dawn, putting behind them once and for all the authoritarianism, corruption, human rights abuses and widespread poverty that have plagued their lives for years.

Like many ordinary Zimbabweans right now, Joy Mviro is adamant that things have changed for the better.

“We can now talk openly,” she tells me confidently, as we stand outside the Edith Opperman Maternity Clinic in the heart of Mbare, the biggest and oldest township in the Zimbabwean capital, Harare.

“Before Mr Mugabe was kicked out, I would have thought twice about talking to a journalist or answering their questions, but not now,” Joy insists.

Just 21 years old, Joy still has most of her life ahead of her, as does her six month-old daughter Keisha, who she has brought to the clinic as part of a regular check up since the baby was born around the time that Mugabe was overthrown late last year.

The new openness Joy Mviro speaks of was evident too in a play currently running at Harare’s Theatre in the Park while I was in the country.

Entitled Operation Restore Regasi, it chronicles the final days of Mugabe’s rule, and is set at the former President’s opulent Blue Roof private residence in Harare, where it depicts the mounting tensions between former first lady Grace Mugabe and the military in the run-up to the momentous events of last November.

The production and its reception are a far cry from the recent past where satire was unacceptable and artists that mocked Mugabe were intimidated by security forces and ruthlessly suppressed.

Operation Restore Regasi takes it title from Operation Restore Legacy the military campaign that triggered Mugabe’s fall and was led by

Zimbabwe’s top military commander, Constantino Chiwenga, who subsequently denied staging a coup d’etat.

Even the play’s title is a pun, as Chiwenga struggles to pronounce “Ls” – and so Legacy became Regasi.

A resounding hit with audiences starved for decades of incisive and satirical humour, there has been no official backlash, a sign of the changing times in Zimbabwe.

That said Harare’s theatre going community remains one far removed from the vast majority of the country’s citizens, especially those who inhabit impoverished townships like Mbare.

With its rundown, high-density housing and bustling informal street markets and vendors, Mbare stands in part as testimony to the slump in Zimbabwe’s formal economy under Mugabe’s rule.

Zimbabweans joke that in Mbare, you can buy anything, including the parts they stole from your car the night before, but real jobs here are scarce.

Under Mugabe’s near four-decade rule, the rate of unemployment rose to more than 80 per cent, forcing many people to eke out a living by hawking on the streets, giving rise to Mbare’s Mupedzanhamo Market, loosely translated from the Shona language as ‘end poverty’.

Not surprisingly as resentment against Mugabe’s Zanu-PF regime grew in this impoverished community, so support for its bitter rivals the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) grew in tandem, miring Mbare in incidents of political violence, especially in the run up to elections.

Such past electoral turmoil one might expect to play on the minds of many here as any day now President Mnangagwa is expected to announce the precise date of eagerly anticipated elections known to be scheduled for sometime in June.

But fears that Zimbabwe’s record of electoral violence might this time around be repeated as Mnangagwa’s Zanu-PF and the MDC, along with hundreds of candidates from other parties, go head to head appear unfounded.

During my time in the country and after speaking with many ordinary citizens as well as political activists, not once did I hear fears expressed that the coming electoral contest would spill onto the streets in violence.

“Their may be the usual few young hot heads, who usually after drinking try to stir up trouble, but that will be about as bad as it gets, I’m certain,” one activist in Mbare told me, echoing what I was to hear time and again from others both in Harare and outside the capital.

If such a tolerant attitude prevails in Mbare, something of a potential political flashpoint, then this, observers say, augurs well for Zimbabwe as a whole.

In Mbare township uncollected refuse, overcrowding, rampant petty crime and widespread health and sanitation problems, tell a sorry tale of the years during which the Mugabe regime let the township and much of Zimbabwe rot.

In the process it made Mbare not just the epicentre of political unrest but prone to typhoid and cholera outbreaks.

“Mbare is a tough place to live, surely you can see that for yourself just standing here,” says Joseph Masenda while his sister nearby fills a bucket with water from an open communal pipe at the foot of a block of dilapidated redbrick flats where many of the windows are broken or boarded up.

“We need change, big change, and if Mnangagwa cannot bring it, then some new leader has to,” insists Masenda who, like so many other Mbare residents, struggles to make ends meet in the unofficial sector as a street vendor.

Few doubt that the coming ballot will be the true test of civil liberties under the leadership of President Mnangagwa, a politician who earned his nickname among Zimbabweans as ‘the crocodile’ by surviving a turbulent political career with a mixture of cunning and ruthlessness.

For the moment, though, concerns over Mnangagwa’s ability to deliver don’t seem to trouble many Zimbabweans other than those who see him as a chip off the old Zanu-PF block and just another part of the political old guard. For others, Mnangagwa can do no wrong.

While walking the streets of Harare I couldn’t help noticing the number of newspapers on stands praising the president.

One prominent Zimbabwe newspaper, The Sunday Mail, applauded the president’s recent visit to China.

‘ED returns with a bagful,’ the newspaper declared in a reference to Mnangagwa’s successful securing of billion of dollars worth of investment for projects in Zimbabwe. But its not just the Chinese who see the opportunity for a new dawn in Zimbabwe.

One morning during my visit I attended Mbare’s Stodart Community Hall, where the European Union’s Commissioner for International Development, Neven Mimica, who had just met President Mnangagwa, signed an agreement with Zimbabwean officials that will see new EU-funded programmes worth £20 million launched to improve people’s access to health services and enhance their livelihoods.

Mimica’s visit was the first high level EU one to Zimbabwe in almost a decade. Coming as it does just before the election, it says much about the EU’s hopes for the country given that EU financial support comes with conditions requiring improvement in Zimbabwe’s democratic process and transition.

“The EU has always been a reliable partner of the Zimbabwean people, and it stands ready to accompany Zimbabwe in its process of change,” said Mimica in a packed Stodart Community Hall.

“We do not want to be a passive partner in this process,” he added, stressing that the EU and others were watching Zimbabwe’s forthcoming elections carefully and that reforms must be made and checks carried out that process is underway for EU financial support to be maintained.

For the time being no one doubts that Zimbabwe still desperately needs that support in both urban and rural communities.

Venture out from Harare’s bustle into the nation's rural hinterland and the true fragility of this beautiful country’s economic stability and faltering steps towards democracy quickly becomes apparent.

Ten years or so ago, in just such a community in a small village north of Bulawayo, I was to meet a 94-year-old great grandmother whose name was Golidem.

Sitting on the floor of her hut, surrounded by a few meagre possessions and cradling her one-month-old great grandson Nkosina lovingly in her arms, she talked eloquently of another time in Zimbabawe. A bygone age when dialogue, not division, made the country a great beacon of hope across Africa. Golidem will have passed on by now but Zimbabwe’s drive to make a better society in rural communities like hers goes on. In the country’s dramatic landscape of the Eastern Highlands, in places like Juliasdale and Nyanga, I spoke with smallholder farmers, who are optimistic about the future since Mugabe’s ousting.

“Some of the projects the EU has helped us fund here are making an enormous difference to our lives, this has a chance to continue now,” says Cecilia Chakauya, who works on a smallholder plot growing corn. Schemes aiming to improve the coping mechanism of communities are especially welcome ensuring there is enough to go around in hard times.

Right now Zimbabwe is still facing hard and uncertain times though. Labour unrest continues with a recent nurses' strike seeing some 10,000 health care employees facing the sack as a result. In rural areas there remains continuing concern over intimidation during the forthcoming June ballot far from the prying eyes of election monitors. There are worries also as to what the all-powerful army and police might do during the campaign and run up to the vote. But all of this in no way dampens the optimism and expectation among Zimbabweans. Hope springs eternal in Zimbabwe it seems, despite the horrors the country has gone through and the hardship it still faces.

Only time will tell whether such optimism and confidence is justified. But for now in Zimbabwe a new mood prevails. As President Mnangagwa himself has said; “Zimbabwe is now open for business.”