Roy Bennett, whose arrest last week posed the first major threat to Zimbabwe’s new unity government, is as reviled within Zanu-PF as he is adored by the MDC’s grassroots supporters.
Bennett is a former coffee farmer from Chimanimani, a prime farming area to the east of the country. He is the MDC’s national treasurer.
He stood as one of the party’s candidates in the 2000 general election, after having lost his Charleswood Estate to Mugabe’s land reforms. His flawless Shona, complete with an almost comical eastern accent, quickly endeared him to the MDC’s grassroots support.
In 2004 Bennett was jailed for assaulting justice minister Patrick Chinamasa during a heated parliamentary debate over land. Chinamasa provoked Bennett by saying the ex-farmer had forgotten that his white ancestors were thieves and murderers who had stolen land from blacks.
The televised incident endeared Bennett even more to his supporters, but it still earned him eight months in prison. During his trial opponents dredged up his past as a member of the BSAP, the brutal Rhodesian police.
Emerging from prison at the end of his term in 2005 a scrawny figure, Bennett was barely recognisable. He deplored the inhuman conditions within the prisons, but vowed to once again stand as an MDC candidate.
He stood with Tsvangirai when the MDC split late in 2005, but the fear of arrest over a terrorism charge drove him into exile in South Africa, where he was granted political asylum in 2007.
He became the MDC’s national treasurer and helped Tsvangirai run a campaign that was better funded than Zanu-PF’s, despite the ruling party’s access to state resources.
Bennett claimed this week that he returned to Zimbabwe upon receiving assurances for his safety from South African President Kgalema Motlanthe.
He celebrated his 52nd birthday in a Mutare jail on Monday.