“What’s so heartening about these elections is that there’s a good percentage of Zimbabwean whites who’ve said, ‘Damn it, let’s get involved,’ and we’ve suffered together with the blacks and feared together with them,” Mr. Bennett told the journalist Peter Godwin in June 2000, the month he was elected to Parliament. “We’ve made a stand and shown that we’re prepared to sacrifice ourselves for this country. And isn’t that what a patriot is after all? It’s the first time in my life I’ve felt really Zimbabwean.”

In 2003, the Charleswood Estate in Chimanimani, owned by Mr. Bennett and his family, was invaded. Mr. Bennett condemned the seizure as illegal. In a raucous exchange in Parliament the following year, the country’s justice minister, Patrick Chinamasa, told Mr. Bennett that his ancestors had been “thieves and murderers.” A scuffle broke out and Mr. Bennett shoved Mr. Chinamasa to the ground; he was imprisoned for a year for assault.

Granted early release for good behavior, Mr. Bennett complained of prison abuses, saying that he had been issued a uniform covered in excrement and lice, and made to stand naked in front of guards.

By then, Mr. Bennett had become a top deputy of Mr. Tsvangirai, and he was named the party’s general treasurer. Fearing rearrest, he fled to South Africa in 2006 and was eventually granted asylum there. But he agreed to return in 2008, when Mr. Tsvangirai defeated Mr. Mugabe in the first round of a presidential election.

Mr. Mugabe’s supporters complained that white farmers were returning “in droves” to reclaim their land under Mr. Tsvangirai, a charge that Mr. Bennett called “absolute nonsense.” But amid rising violence, Mr. Tsvangirai withdrew from the runoff, following a fierce internal debate.

“Pulling out of the elections now would be giving in to a violent dictator who is prepared to wage war on his own people to stay in power,” Mr. Bennett, who was acting as the party’s spokesman, said at the time.

Mr. Bennett was named deputy agriculture minister under a power-sharing government led by Mr. Mugabe and Mr. Tsvangirai as prime minister. But on his return to Zimbabwe in February 2009, he was promptly arrested and charged with treason, ostensibly in connection with a cache of arms found at his home in 2006. Mr. Tsvangirai denounced the arrest as politically motivated and warned that military intelligence officials — who remained loyal to Mr. Mugabe — had plotted to harm Mr. Bennett.