(JOURN) What zombies are really like in South Africa

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. 

Khumalo pictured next to his impersonator. 

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

Prologue to Smoke and Dust

I wrote this when I was about 15. It has undergone many an edit, and I fear will undergo many still before I am completely satisfied with it. It's the start to one of the few stories I have finished. I haven't really paid attention to this story for a few years.

At first I didn’t know whether it was smoke or dust. A thick haze of vapor hung over the city, masking the setting sun.

It was something I had seen many times. Something I had looked at for hours on end. And every time I looked at it, I felt the compulsion – the forbidden longing.

I stepped forward. My mind was too busy admiring the scene to notice where my feet were taking me.

The blazing buildings rose like giants. In the grips of sunset they looked like they were burning. Orange-red flames licked at their feet, turning smoothly into silver as the buildings climbed the sky. Their heads disappeared into a thick cloudbank, windows masked by gray clouds.

My feet led me to a broad road that seemed to stretch the length of the deserted city.

In the hollow silence I could hear nothing but my own breathing, my own insignificant footsteps on the gravel – and the faint strains of a whisper. It was soft enough to be imagined, like a song I couldn’t get out of my head.

But as my feet continued to move, the strains grew louder. It buzzed blearily in my ears and turned my attention to the only break in the sheets of glass: an old, rusted gate.

It stood out blandly against the new buildings beside it, gray tendrils of steel twisted in an intricate design. A chill touched my spine.

I peered through the thick tendrils. A broken swing set, the remains of a slide and a gravelly sandpit were all that remained of a playground. The park shared the same lack of color as the rest of the city. Everything was a mottled, windswept gray, only occasionally flecked with the brilliance of the sunset.

The buzz had turned into notes. A jumble of half mumbled, half hummed words made me stand on tiptoe and clutch the gate in an attempt to see where it was coming from.

But as my small fingers curled round the cold iron, I felt it move forward. I let go and stood back hastily.

It swung open, creaking ominously.

A little girl sat cross-legged in the sandpit. She rocked back and forth, long black hair swishing with the motion. I took a tentative step forward. She didn’t seem to notice. Perhaps she was too busy scooping up sand and letting it siphon through outstretched fingers.

I stepped closer still. A threadbare peach dress hung limply on her body, which was bony and almost under-developed. The dress was frilly and childish, and I could imagine being forced to wear it to a party.

I took another step.

Then another. 

The girl’s fingers raked through the sand in an unending cycle. They were small, frail like the rest of her.

With another step I noticed her hair was completely masking her face. The long black curtain swung in front of her nose, never showing any skin.

The little girl hypnotized me. Maybe it was the swaying motion or the fact that the song she was humming sounded slightly familiar, or perhaps her strange appearance.

Even her skin seemed weird, as though she had bad sunburn. But that couldn’t be it – her skin looked as lifeless as everything around it.

I swallowed and stepped ever closer.

A piercing crack tore me from my trance. Something stabbed into the sole of my foot and I cried out in pain. Through the tears in my eyes, I slowly looked down at my foot.

A jagged piece of porcelain stuck out of the soft flesh. The half-smashed head of a porcelain doll lay inches from my foot, covered in blood. Its nose, right eye and cheek were smashed beside the otherwise perfect face. The remaining eye gleamed. I began shaking.

I looked at the girl.

She had stopped humming. In one swift movement, her head snapped up, sending hair flying in all directions.

I screamed. Pale red skin stretched taught over a small skull. Her eyes, pouchy and swollen, seemed to burst out of their sockets, not white but blood red with ice blue irises.

Blackened, cracked lips peeled back in a mad yell that came out as a strangled gurgle. Blood dribbled out of her mouth, leaking over and between sharp black teeth. It trickled down her chin, seeping into the collar of her party dress.

I moved before she had the chance to twitch. I turned on my heel and ran. Gurgling screams followed me. Pain thudded in my foot as I ran, but I couldn’t stop. Bloody footprints mapped my path.

I bounded up the hill. The cries receded until I couldn’t hear them anymore. At the top of the hill I stopped. My legs were shaking. I could hardly breathe. I turned slowly around to look back at the city.

Where the street started and the grass began, stood a little girl in a peach party dress. Hair flew around her head, seeming to crackle with static. In the distance thunder rumbled.

Our eyes connected. For a second I was bound again by the strange girl. The breath was knocked out of my body.

For that second that we looked at each other – I felt my heart stop.

And then I was running down the hill. Sprinting. Somewhere on the downward slope I tripped. I lost all footing and flew through the air. Pain shuddered through my body once again as my head connected with a boulder, and the last thing I saw was a blur of green, slowly fading to black.

A butcher

This started out as a writing exercise in which I have to write about hands in three different genres. This first one was supposed to be horror. I think I got off track with the hands part, but hopefully it's still entertaining:

He thumbed through the pages steadily, the stink of chloroform and blood seeping into the thick paper. Smears were left, dark brown after the bright red splashes that coloured the earlier pages.

The lamp cast a harsh yellow light, the old globe brushed of the dust that filled the rest of the small storeroom. Instruments hung the walls, edges dull in what Edgar used to call the “fright light” when he was a child. A doctor, like his father, he was introduced to the trade at a young age. These were his father’s anatomy books. This had been his surgery. Edgar had come into the room, and the harsh light had brought to life flesh and blood and the screams of women.

He shook his head at the memory. A silly boy he had been. He turned back to his pages, but still couldn’t find the exact paragraph.

Retainers of the soul, his father used to say, books and their material. He used to say that a book retains not only its writer’s soul, but also those of its readers. He was a wistful man.

A baker might leave the smell of dough and chocolate. The heavy-handed thumb of a serious man, a lawyer or banker perhaps, would leave a dent in the corners. A woman’s perfume might cling and whisper as another reader opened the folds.

Edgar seldom bothered to think what future readers of these books might make him out to be, but today the thought persisted, though not unpleasantly. He looked at the smears, and underneath one such he finally made out the tiny writing of the embalming section. Perhaps they would suspect he was a doctor. The imaginative mind might stretch farther, touch his real indent upon these pages. They might figure him for a butcher. 

He glanced behind him at the form on the surgery table, the mottled tourniquets, the drip of blood. Besides the hum of the light and the crinkling of paper as he thumbed, the steady drip was the only sound in the room.

A butcher. Edgar smiled.

“My father taught me well,” he breathed.

(JOURN) Turning tragedy into charity: How monks make a difference

In 1998, three little boys, ages two to three, were playing on the train tracks on the outskirts of Grahamstown.

It is a natural place to play. Giant trees run along the tracks, which rise and dip over the rollicking hills surrounding Grahamstown. Sunlight dapples the earth, its cheerful light skimming over scrubland, valleys and rusting iron lines. With the cool breeze rushing between slopes and murmuring in the dry leaves of the poplar trees, the freedom of playing unsupervised must have been a delight.

These three boys were hit by a train. Only one survived.

Immeasurable though the sorrow caused by this event may be, it seems only natural that the monks from the nearby monastery found a vocation through its tragedy. When the unnamed boys were hit on the train tracks near the Mariya uMama weThemba Monastery, the priory realised that God had called them to the area for a purpose.

The monastery is set into one of the huge hills just outside of Grahamstown, and is part of the Order of the Holy Cross, a brotherhood of Anglican Benedictine monasteries founded in New York in 1884.

It is hard to imagine a more tranquil setting for a monastery. Its clustered black buildings are set into one of these colossal hills and one can almost imagine the green pastures mentioned in Psalm 23 when one looks out of the panoramic church windows.

For an American order, the monastery is suffused with a distinctly African atmosphere. Thorn bushes, fruit trees and crosses twined out of dried branches dot the sloped landscape, which is typical of the Eastern Cape. The church itself houses a wood-carved Madonna and Son, depicted as a Xhosa woman with her child.

The brotherhood decided to settle in South Africa after they were invited by then archbishop of Cape Town, Desmond Tutu, in 1989. After being offered a property by the sisters of the Community of the Resurrection of Our Lord, the monastery was established just outside of Grahamstown in 1998.

According to the prior, or head of the local monastery, Brother Timothy Jolley, Benedictine monks don’t have a specific project or ministry.

“Our work if you will, our ministry, is a response to whatever God presents to us,” says Brother Timothy. He speaks with the strange mixture of gravity and jollity one would expect of a monk. His fingers press together in front of his lips and he frowns as his white habit rustles. Grey wisps surround a merry face and his eyes are soft and contemplative. Only his southern American accent and thick old-fashioned spectacles betray the traditional idea of Friar Tuck he embodies.

“These three boys got into danger and into harm’s way because they weren’t supervised,” drawls Brother Timothy pensively. “The parents were working and the person who was supposed to be watching over them didn’t.”

This was the start of the brotherhood’s involvement with the education of children from the area surrounding the monastery. The project, which started with transportation and funds to go to the schools in Grahamstown, became an afterschool homework project, and is now developing into a fully-fledged independent school.

“It grew to the point that we now have about 60 young people, ranging from Gr. R all through to university, whom we support,” says Brother Timothy.

To cope with the increase in pupils and the educational demands these children were facing, the monastery decided to start building a school on their property in 2009. The schoolhouse is currently being constructed on the lip of a hill overlooking the dramatic valley at the foot of the monastery. The brotherhood hopes to start using the schoolhouse in January 2012, and to formally bless the schoolhouse on 4 February 2012.

Until then, students are being taught in some of the monastery’s smaller buildings. The school tries to maintain a low student/teacher ratio (13/1 at present), and supplies students with books, small laptops, lunch and transportation. The students are often taken on fieldtrips to various places of interest, such as the aquarium in Port Elizabeth and game drives in the Grahamstown surrounds.

“It is our job to reflect the issues of injustice to our society, and we do that by living our lives in a different way, by living our lives as just as we can and as accepting as we can,” says Brother Timothy decisively.

He smiles and gives a reassuring nod. There is a satisfaction and contentment about his frame as he finishes telling the story of the monastery. To him, things have come full circle. What was tragedy has become hope and opportunity. What was once an area of strife and sorrow has become a peaceful haven to anyone who wishes to enter it.

Mariyah uMama weThemba.

It means Mary Mother of Hope.







Some of the preschool-age children attending the Holy Cross School at Mariyah uMama weThemba Monastery:

Vignette

Might be a little weird... just bear with the description. 

I felt it in the room – the giant egg she was sitting on. It seemed to buzz beneath her squatting buttocks, humming as they clenched thickly, glutinously. Her lips smacked with the aftertaste of the secret and her little finger curled away from the china as she took a sip.

Every time she opened her viscous lips I heard a creak reverberate around the room as the egg fissured under her weight. She tottled and her lips twisted into a leer, the snot treacle secret bubbling between small teeth, leaking through the cracks around her mouth until it seeped, insipid, into the conversation.

“Sophie?”

The egg and slime disappeared as my aunt turned to me. “Who was that boy I saw you cozying up to under the willows this afternoon?”

The egg was gone but I heard it crack. Delicate spindles of white exploded under my aunt’s malice and she dropped into the yoke of my troubles, slurping deliriously.

My mother’s eyes snapped from their scrutiny of her wineglass and her eyes fixed on me. They didn’t blaze, nor did they flash. Rather, a cool contemplation crept over the blue and her chin rose in reappraisal.

“A boy?” she asked.

My aunt’s lips spread over sharp-filed teeth. I saw the yoke on her chin, bubbling ecstatically from her throat. Her green eyes took on a robust flare as they flicked from my mother to me. “The dark-haired one,” her voice quivered before tucking into the next bit of revelry with a prolonged slurp. “Simply gorrrgeous.”

My mother stood up swiftly. Her waved black hair swayed for a moment before falling into place with her rigid posture. Thin fingers grasped my aunt’s pudgy hands.

“That’s quite enough tea for the afternoon, Georgia.”

My aunt writhed to her feet and was led away by my mother.

My fingers brushed the hair out of my face and I pushed myself off the chaise, pushed away from the elaborate lounge. Long fingers clutched my arm and I winced. The hiss of my mother’s voice burnt my ear.

“That boy?”

I squirmed in her grip and closed my eyes. The music laughed in my ears as my voice quivered. “We weren’t –”

“Cozying up? Don’t lie to me Sophia. You think I don’t hear the servants talking? You think I don’t know he comes to your window in the night and leaves notes by your ledge?”

“It’s not my fault!”

The Hermit

There was a sliver of sound near the hovel on the hill. It was the low, wet slithering of something being dragged over forest leaves. If you listened closely, you could hear him: ragged breaths hindered by bile constantly frothing up his throat; small, shuffling footsteps – like long strides were beyond him. And a constant, low muttering of incoherent words.

His crooked arms stretched behind him, fingers tightly curled around the pale flesh of an arm. A woman’s head lolled, her wet hair snagging on twigs and carrying leaves in its wake. Her eyes were open, ants swarming over the ice blue irises.

“Pot’s a brewing, monkeys spewing,” the words bubbled from the man’s cracked and bloodied lips, thinly disguising a leer. His voice was a hissing mess of gurgling sounds, strung together as though he had learnt to talk from something other than a human. “Supper be served tonight…”

When the man reached his hovel the first loud sound pierced the night. A baby’s scream rang through the forest and echoed to the village below. The man’s smile widened, lips cracking even with the small movement. He licked them to stop the blood from dribbling over his filthy chin and released the woman’s arm.

“Supper be ours tonight…”

The villagers sat in silence as the baby’s first cries split the stale twilight. A shudder ran through the small feasting hall and the smoke from a struggling fire in the middle of the room obscured many a wince. Only one man raised his head. Dark eyes darted from one lowered face to the next.

 “COWARDS!” the scream exploded from his shaking body as the first cry died.

Powerful fists gripped the nearest tankard. It exploded against the steps to a raised platform, mead slushing over the sandals of the row of elders sitting there. The wrinkles on each of the five faces twisted into a different expression. There was disgust on one as he shook the mead from his toes. The tiniest twist of sympathy rippled under another’s irritation. The third and fourth looked in different directions, each wishing to be somewhere else. It was only the fifth, the one in the middle, whose tight wrinkles churned into a thin grin. 

“Cowards! Thieves! Maggots!” Tiberius’s rage punched over the baby’s sounds.

But when the squeals stopped and another shudder ran through the hall. The congregation could almost hear the suckling sounds. The deep slurping. The smacking of tiny lips over dead skin. Tiberius closed his eyes, tears spilling into a frazzled black beard. His fists clenched and unclenched as the helplessness, the listless energy of the hopeless and the reckless coursed through his limbs.

“She was my wife... I have to... I need...” he muttered, fingers pulling at his hair. Another villager’s hand shook his shoulder.

“Peace, Tiberius,” the man whispered. “Peace, please. They won’t stand for another outburst.”

Wild eyes rounded on the man. He was slightly younger than Tiberius and recently married, as Tiberius had been nine months ago. The man’s terrified glances shot between the row on the platform and his friend’s crazed face.

“You can control your friend, Dracus?” the man in the middle asked. “A certain level of regret is expected, but he is disgracing himself.”

Tiberius surged forward but Dracus restrained him. Both men were powerful, and Dracus panted with the effort.

“Take pity on him, Adrastus,” Dracus pleaded. “They were newlywed when the creature...”

“This is why,” Adrastus’ voice barked over him, “we do not take brides in the hunting season. Any loss he experienced is born from his wasted crotch, not a broken heart. He knows the laws of our land – the nature of our village. If their feelings had been true they would have waited, lest our saviour –” his eyes flicked dangerously around the villagers, “choose her.”

“Bastard!” Tiberius’s voice broke and Dracus’s face turned red with effort. “We were in love. We waited years! She could wait no longer.”

Adrastus’ wrinkles deepened. “You flout our way of life and dare excuse it with love? Restrain him now, Dracus, before he defiles himself any further.”

The elder sat with groan, his fellows shook their heads, condemning stares fixing on the friends before them.

“Light behold you,” Dracus whispered to Tiberius. “Take your peace before they take it from you.”

Tiberius twisted with speed Dracus did not recognise. His shoulder pounded into Dracus’s gut and they catapulted onto the table as villagers scrambled out of their way.

Dracus’s fist connected with Tiberius’s cheek. Fingers dug into his throat and he was dragged down with Tiberius. They grappled, villagers swarming closer as Tiberius gained the upper hand. Fist after fist cracked into Dracus’s face. Blood burst with every impact until Tiberius was pulled off by the other men in the room.

“All of you!” he yelled, flailing wildly in the grip of his friends. “You sit with your heads bowed, your hands folded, thanking the gods he did not take that of yours!”

The sound of his voice filled the entire hall. It curled around the smoke and smothered it, filling every sense of every villager with a cruel taste of the emotions tormenting him.

“Andrea was mine!”

“Fool!” blood sprayed as Dracus spit the words. “We are all his, and his alone. He keeps us and we thank him. And if he wants your whore it is right that he should take her.”

Tiberius screamed as he burst free from the men’s hold. By the time they slung him off Dracus was all but dead. Tiberius scrambled for the door, the men checking swords as they readied for pursuit.

“Leave him!”

Adrastus banged a staff to the platform. “Let him seek the curse! His fate will be worse than any retribution we could muster. Worse even than his wife’s.”

Tiberius burst into the night as strangled cheers rose to match the baby’s renewed screams.

He was found three weeks later, at the base of the hill in an open grave. The boy who had found him thought him dead. He was immobile, slumped, half sinking into the muddy grave.

But as the elder had promised, who approaches the hovel suffers a fate worse than death. When the villagers dragged him out of the grave they recoiled. His lips had been cut off, bloodied teeth distorted in a never-ending smile. Two brown eyes forever stared in the absence of eyelids, the skin roughly hewn beneath his brow bone, eyeballs swimming in blood. His beard covered most of the boils, but some of them festered on his nose and forehead, quivering evilly.

One villager cracked. In a rage of fear he raised an axe and dropped it, blade screaming toward Tiberius’s neck. The surrounding villagers closed their eyes but there was no wet thwack of metal carving through flesh.

Instead an echoing crack rose from the blade as it splintered, and a cruel cackle rang through the valley. The villagers’ eyes cast around the surrounding hills but the creature was nowhere to be seen.

Yes, Tiberius’s fate was indeed worse than his wife’s. Cursed by his arrogance, he could neither be murdered nor take his own life, only live with the pain of his injuries until a ripe old age.

Last moments

I die.

It's surprisingly hard to do. I swallow the cloth many times before it gets lodged in the entrance to my lungs and he cannot pull it out quickly enough. I see the panic in his eyes as he gropes. They widen, horrified that this would be his last round. My lungs spasm. The veins pumping blood to bruising wrists and ankles are already slackening. The bruises on my nose will last longer.  I breathe the fabric coarsely. The water does nothing to soften its penetration.  

The worst part is that I suck it in myself.