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Harare - President Robert Mugabe on Friday sharply criticised US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, saying she was a "slave" to white masters in Washington who had branded Zimbabwe an outpost of tyranny.
Launching the election campaign of his ruling party, Mugabe referred to Rice as "that girl born out of the slave ancestry, who should know from the history of slavery in America, from the president situation of blacks in America that the white man is not a friend".
"The white man is the slave master to her," said Mugabe in a two-hour speech launching the campaign of his Zimbabwe African National Union - Patriotic Front (Zanu-PF) party for the March 31 parliamentary elections.
'Her master's voice'
"She says Zimbabwe is one of the five or six outposts of tyranny. Ah well, she has got to echo her master's voice," he declared.
At a US Senate confirmation hearing in Washington last month, Rice, an African-American and one of the most influential members of President George W Bush's administration, branded Zimbabwe along with Belarus, Cuba, Iran, Myanmar and North Korea as "outposts of tyranny".
If Zimbabwe were indeed a tyranny, Mugabe argued, "the first person to lose his head would be Ian Smith", who led the white-minority government in Rhodesia, as Zimbabwe was called before independence in 1980.
"We have kept him and protected that head. He eats our food, lives in our home comfortably and is protected by our rules of law and order," said Mugabe.
Smith, who was prime minister from 1965 to 1979, lives on a farm outside Harare and has remained an outspoken critic of Mugabe.
"He enjoys the comfort of Zimbabwe, can travel... He writes books freely, against us even, and using that head, which, if we had been a tyrannical government, we would have long taken off," he added.
"How many countries would have done what we did?" Mugabe asked, adding that Smith enjoys "charity, generosity, kindness and forgiveness in our house".
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