By Farayi Mungoshi

“Mama I met Stacy today. I tried waving at her but she didn’t respond and acted like she didn’t see me,” said my cousin’s 16-year-old daughter as I was visiting their Ruwa home over the festive season. Her mother frowned and told her to forget about Stacy. Out of curiosity I asked who Stacy was. Her father, Mark, jumped into the conversation and told me that she was his daughter’s friend at primary school. “So what happened to their friendship?” I asked, having judged from the mother’s response and annoyance at the mention of this name. “They grew up.” The father said, “And oh, she is also white.”
The conversation turned to how we do not talk to some of our white peers from primary school anymore despite having played sport together and sat next to each other in class.
At least at my school there were not as many white kids so I never noticed this, but for Mark, that was different; having gone to a private school, he knew many whites.
He went on to talk about how, at high school in the 1990s, more than 10 years after independence, racism was still rife at his school (a certain private school in Harare). Whites used to hang around in their own corner, with blacks in their own, the Indians and Coloureds also in their own respective corners, “even in the classroom, you would find that we sat according to our racial groups.” Even though Mark and I went to different schools, I could relate to what he was saying. While he went to a school with a majority of white students, I went to one with a majority of black students with an insignificant number of whites, coloureds and Indians.
Back then at my former school we called each other names like Horti (black), Honky (white)and Gauffle (Coloured). I don’t quite remember the Indian one but I distinctively remember one Indian prefect at assembly when I was in Form 1 saying at the prefects’ assembly: “I want to see all the Curry Owns who decided to bunk hockey practice last week in the prefects study at one.” That he would call one of his own by this derogatory name, Curry, was weird but such was the life at my school.
We called each other by these names and it didn’t seem to bother anybody or mean anything bad at that time, or so I thought.
It was almost two decades after leaving school, in a pub in town one day, when one girl from the Hillside area met and started accusing an old coloured man drinking in the same pub of calling her Horti back in the day when she was young.
The old man who was drinking with his black friends tried to defend himself but none of them wanted to hear any of it. They stopped buying him beer and started ignoring him. Over 20 years later that was when I took what we termed jokes (name calling) seriously. This was the basis on which segregation was built, on which would later escalate into something bigger, the older we grew.
During the colonial era, an apartheid system was used to segregate racial groups by placing them into different residential areas, and this was governed by one’s position at the work place spilling into schools.
Whites had better job positions and were in charge of all management positions.
The blacks were at the bottom of the wage pyramid with the coloureds and Indians serving in middle management, supervisory positions and they lived mostly in middle income areas.
Thus the whites looked down upon all the other races and were tutored that they were superior beings, a lesson they would then teach their young ones in turn.
Traits of which many in Zimbabwe can confirm are still residual in some with the exception of a few Zimbabwean whites who have managed to change according to the times.
Why do I say this? Some would agree with me that the way some of our fellow whites behave when talking to us is different from the way visiting white Europeans talk.
The latter seem less uptight, more accommodating and easy to laugh with. Some might say, given our past history what did you expect!
But then you also get those whites who went to schools where there were more blacks, like those at Prince Edward during my time, for example. It is not surprising to find any one of them in a social group full of black people enjoying their drinks and still feeling at home.
If it is all an act then they must be very good but I believe it all boils down to the way we were brought up and for most of these folk, it is business as usual.
These, managed somehow to adapt better to the infiltration by blacks into certain segregated areas where whites only could be found.
This infiltration into white neighborhoods, work places and schools destabilised a whole system meant to serve whites.
This is the ripple effect caused by the stone called colonialism thrown into the calm waters of Zimbabwe generations ago.
While some adapted, others did not. Another friend from high school, a black guy, decided to date a white girl and was invited to a party. Upon arriving at the party he discovered he was the only black guy there.
It was clear that he was there because of the girl, but upon seeing him, the white males decided to teach him a lesson despite one of their own having invited him.
He was beaten up and told not to put his hand where it does not belong. This is over a decade after independence.