By Maidei Jenny Magirosa

AN African American friend and I were walking around down town Harare.
He said he could not see any white people shopping down there.
“Where are the white folks?” he asked.
“Is this the ghetto?”
I said it was not the ghetto.
Then we walked to First Street and still, there were no white people.
I said in the colonial days, First Street shops were mostly for white people.
Blacks were not even allowed to try a dress on because it would smell of black people.
Yet those who could afford to go to those were professional people and often had money to buy there.
We then went to a coffee shop in Avondale and we started seeing white people.
Apart from one white woman with two African women who seemed to be in a meeting, the white people were sitting among black people, but not with black people.
Then we moved to Sam Levy and somewhere there, we found a whole restaurant without a single black person other than the waiters.
“Does this restaurant belong to members of the Aryan race?” my African- American friend asked.
He wanted to know what has happened here and I tried to explain that the history of the country has created a class of wealthy white Zimbabweans who keep very much to themselves and voted for the MDC.
Most of them made money and settled in former whites only suburbs during the colonial period.
They have maintained the money or have passed it on to their children and grand children.
On the other hand, some of us blacks did not receive anything at all from our parents to pass on.
In fact, our parents and grandparents worked very hard for nothing on the farms and in the industries of the privileged white people.
My friend said that the assumed racial superiority of the white people has repercussions in present day Zimbabwe.
I agreed and then I sat down and did a little quiz below as follows:
There are several places in Harare frequented by white people only.
True or false?
There are some schools in Harare frequented by white people only?
True or false?
In some of the former white schools, swimming, hockey, tennis and badminton often have a majority of white people.
True or false?
The majority of pre-school teachers in the expensive suburbs are mostly white women?
True or false?
I came out with ‘true’ in each one of the questionnaire.
This racial division began long before colonialism in Zimbabwe.
One major reason for this disparity and division goes back to the myth of the Aryan race.
During Rhodesia, Cecil Rhodes and some of the colonialist believed in the myth of the Aryan race.
What was the Aryan racial myth?
The Aryans were an all powerful conquering tribe of Central Asian chariot-riders and horse lords who swept through India and Iran 4 000 years ago.
These Aryans with roots in North India prevented racial mixing before settling in present day Europe.
Under Hitler, the Nazis adopted the swastika as their symbol or totem of Aryanism.
Ironically, the Nazis created their hateful, white racist ideology based on an ethnic group from India.
Later on, the racist work conducted by the missionaries diminished the link to India.
The myth of the Aryan race was later developed to explain that modern Europeans were the direct descendants of the ancient Greeks.
As such only the Europeans were seen as having contributed to civilisation and not the blacks or the Indians.
European Christian civilisation, then viewed the various Bible stories as a historical fact.
They said history began with the creation of Adam and Eve, followed by the flood, the survival of Noah until the birth of Jesus.
One of the most influential promoters of the Aryan myth was Jacob Grimm, who wrote a collection of fairy stories such as Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty.
Grimm argued that these stories represented the occult lore of the Aryan people.
His views were adopted by Max Muller, a scholar in the 19th century.
He wrote:
“The Aryan nations, who pursued a northwesterly direction, stand before us in history as the principal nations of northwestern Asia and Europe.
“They have been the prominent actors in the great drama of history, they have perfected society and morals; and we learn from their literature and works of art the elements of science, the laws of art, and the principles of philosophy.
“In continual struggle with each other and with Semitic and Turanian races, these Aryan nations have become the rulers of history, and it seems to be their mission to link all parts of the world together by the chains of civilisation, commerce and religion.”
The missionaries went on to concoct numerous versions of the Aryan Racial Theory to suit a particular historical situation.
Such theories of Aryan white superiority continue to be maintained by some modern historians who believe that the Aryans are the ancestors of the modern Europeans.
These are the people my African American friends referred to as the Aryans.
We see them eating, drinking and socialising alone without any black people among them.
This situation has historical roots in colonialism and the racial separation also preached by missionaries.
In Africa, the same myth contributed to the genocide in Rwanda. Commenting on recent Hutu-Tutsi conflicts, the French anthropologist Jean-Pierre Langellier wrote:
“The idea that the Hutus and the Tutsis were physically different was first aired in the 1860s by the British explorer John Speke.
“The history of Rwanda (like that of much of Africa) has been distorted by missionaries, academics and colonial administrators. “They made the Tutsis out to be a superior race, which had conquered the region and enslaved the Hutus.
“Missionaries taught the Hutus that historical fallacy, which was the result of racist European concepts being applied to an African reality.
“At the end of the fifties, the Hutus used that discourse to react against the Tutsis.” 
As a result, the genocide that occurred in Rwanda in early 1994 can also be attributed to a mindset of racial superiority engendered by Christian missionary-scholars who argued that the Tutsi were related to the Aryan race.
Sadly, historical beliefs in racial difference and the Aryan myth continue to exist as shown by the social separation between blacks and whites in Zimbabwe today.