A train rambles by suspiciously slowly. The moon lights on fingers that curl gingerly around the frame of an open compartment. The wind rips a nail from greying flesh. A face swims out of the gloom, teeth gnarled, eyes glazed, blood dripping from flapping, putrid lips.
It is a zombie train, and if you're standing close enough to the tracks, it has come for you.
This might sound like the scene from another bad zombie movie, but in some societies in South Africa, this is a real fear. The word “zombie” is derived from zonbi (Haitian Creole) and nzumbe (North Mbundu), which refer to the reanimation of the dead through mystical means. Zombies have a distinguished presence in pop culture, but few realise that the cult is based on lore from all over the world. Our recent Writing and Editing project on the tag game Humans vs. Zombies, which was played on Rhodes’s campus last week, inspired me to take a look at South Africans’ belief in the undead.
In South Africa, it is believed that witches turn people into zombies by kidnapping and killing them, cutting out their tongue and sending a magical image (what is actually a plant stem, but which appears as the victim’s body) to the family of the victim in order to avoid suspicion. By cutting out the tongue of the victim, he or she cannot scream or ask for help. Zombies are subdued by strong potions when they are reanimated, which rob them of their memories, willpower and sex drive. Thus, contrary to the Western idea of brain/flesh-craving zombies, South African zombies have no desires other than to eat porridge and work. It is generally believed that zombies are kept for labouring by night, and are stored away during the day. It is also believed that a small child can turn the dead into a zombie.
Actually called a witch train, the above scene was thought to be common (minus the rotting flesh and ripping nails) after railways had been built in South Africa to transport migrant workers. People believed that the witches who created the zombies used trains that did not run on tracks to transport their real-life zombie armies. Niehaus (2005) wrote:
“Witches’ trains are believed to abduct people who wander about at night. Should they board, the conductor will ask them ‘Single or return?’ Those who reply ‘Single’ disappear forever. They are killed, join the zombies on the train, and are forced to work for the witch. Those who say ‘Return’ are beaten and thrown from the train at a distant location.”
While zombies had always featured in traditional folklore, the instigation of apartheid laws, some of which separated communities and forced many people to rely on migrant work for subsistence, exacerbated the fear of community members turning others into zombies. According to Niehaus, this was due to deteriorating standard of living and conditions among black communities in South Africa. “Zombie-keeping”, an accusation freely meted out, was a way of surviving when you couldn’t afford workers.
The persistence of belief in zombies in South Africa was recently showcased when a man claimed to be the traditional singer Khulekani Kwakhe "Mgqumeni" Khumalo three years after his death. The man claimed that he had been kept in a cave full of zombies by a witchdoctor and put under a spell. According to Global Post, crowds gathered in Khumalo’s home village and grew hysterical. Police used truncheons and a water cannon to keep the crowd under control. The man’s DNA and fingerprints didn’t match that of Khumalo’s, and he was later proven to be one Sibusiso John Gcabashe.
Despite being a fraud, the crowd’s reaction to the news, and Gcabashe’s success in fooling even a few of Khumalo’s family members, is a testament to the strong belief South Africans still hold in zombies. We might sneer at Hollywood gore and blood, but who knows what really happens in the South African night?
Sources:
Niehaus, Isak. "Witches and Zombies of the South African Lowveld: Discourse, Accusations and Subjective Reality". The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Vol. 11, No. 2 (Jun., 2005), pp.191-210
http://www.globalpost.com/dispatches/globalpost-blogs/weird-wide-web/khulekani-mgqumeni-khumalo-back-from-dead-musician-video
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/02/07/us-safrica-zombie-crime-idUSTRE8161IG20120207
Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zombie#South_Africa
A really well-researched post! Glad I didn't steal your idea too badly.
ReplyDeleteI find it interesting to see how an idea from folklore can evolve into the icon of horror movies, losing so much of its original meaning and significance.
Thank Brendan. It is really fascinating and I would love to find out a bit more about the Western zombie lore (the traditional kind, because I think the movie kind only started with a horror movie), I wonder where the whole brains thing came in though.
ReplyDeleteI think the pop culture idea we have of zombies today is a mutation more of the Haitian Voodoo zombie, which is more like the dead flesh in tattered clothes we see in movies.