> It's not my fault
I don’t think anyone was blaming you personally, nor am I.
> that the experience with developers coming from those areas has not been good and my current company does not want to repeat the mistake.
> There's no racism involved, African applicants are very welcome as they live in the same timezone as most of Europe do.
Whether or not racism is involved in this case, it is absolutely possible to be racist against Middle Easterners and Indians without being racist against Africans. Racism is not a single binary yes/no question.
Also, is the time zone (whether of residence or of work) really the determining factor, or is it where the person personally or ancestrally comes from?
For example, would the client consider someone personally and ancestrally from India or the Middle East who currently lives in Germany or Africa and works in the local time zone there, or who lives in India or a Middle Eastern country but nevertheless can work at the same times that the Europeans work instead of asynchronously?
(Tangent: Egypt is usually considered to be both in Africa and in the Middle East, and it’s in a Europe-compatible time zone like the rest of Africa. The rest of my comment will ignore this, but it highlights how weird it is to exclude the Middle East but not Africa for time zone reasons.)
What about a Swedish or British person who lives in India or a Middle Eastern country and works in the local time zone there?
And does the client’s policy treat Israel like the Middle Eastern country that it in fact is, or is “Middle Eastern” a short hand for “majority Arab or certain other ethnicities such as Persian but not African”?
I’ve worked with plenty of good and bad people from all regions - including not only good and bad people from India and the Middle East, but also including good and bad people from Europe and the Americas. The same is true when I’ve interviewed people as a hiring manager.
Your client’s biases are not supported by most data or anecdotes, unless there is something very unusual about the particular candidate pool they attract, in which they should fix their outreach methods.
Rather than true racism, my suspicion is that your client is simply unaware of how to get past the cultural differences that developers from India and many Middle Eastern countries have to overcome in order to work well in European (or American) companies, none of which are inherent to their level of talent or skill. For example, they need to learn that it’s okay for an individual contributor to take initiative, to admit problems, and to (politely and with data) question potentially bad decisions made or proposed by people above them in the hierarchy.
There are ways to either retrain people from that region or to filter at an early stage of the hiring process for candidates who have already made that adjustment.