An obituary in ‘The Guardian’ said that only Winston Churchill’s self-mythologising surpassed this as a model of how to secure one’s place in history. In Parliament he was a champion of the poor and under-privileged but in his own life was enormously wealthy, married to the American millionaire Catherine Middleton De Camp, a socialist educationalist.
The Benns lived in a large house in one of London’s richest areas – Notting Hill – and he once said: ”My contribution to the Labour Party is that I know the British establishment inside out and what they’re up to.” In the 1960s, Benn was a strong opponent of Ian Smith and all-white rule in Rhodesia, an opponent of apartheid in South Africa and in later life a critic of President Robert Mugabe who he said had misled and betrayed the people of Zimbabwe.
Benn participated in anti-Mugabe demonstrations but was always quick to tell journalists that Ian Smith of Rhodesia laid the pavement upon which Robert Mugabe walked after the birth of Zimbabwe in 1980.
Tony Ben was definitely right. White supremacist tendencies and repressive laws paved the ground on which dictators like Mugabe later tread and thrive upon. The Special Branch and Selous Scouts are the Central Intelligence Organisation that Mugabe now relies upon to harrass, suppress and even eliminate opponents. Ruining the country is the prize that Mugabe won in being detained and then being forced out of the country to lead a liberation fight for his own personal freedom in the guise of emancipating the generality of the people. Colonialism and white racism created the dictatorships that the continent has to grapple with who were trained by the same system to employ ruthless techniques and tactics against dissenters, and to create elite cliques to replace the white racist supremacists who preceded these black rulers.