Zombies in the Afro-Caribbean World

In folklore, a zombie is a dead person who has been brought back to life through voodoo. Although it can perform physical functions such as walking and labor, it has no consciousness. Zombies are very prominent in the folklore of Haiti.

Do Haitian voodoo practitioners have the power to transform people into zombies? Are zombies real? Is the truth really out there?

Well, in 1962 Clairvius Narcisse was admitted to the Albert Schweitzer Hospital in Deschapelles, Haiti. He was feverish and coughing up blood. Three days later he died. His death was certified by medical staff and he was placed in cold storage for twenty hours before being buried. In 1980, he walked up to his sister, Angelina, claiming to have spent the last eighteen years as a zombie, working on a sugar plantation with other zombies in Northern Haiti. He has a scar on his right cheek that he sustained when a nail was driven into his coffin. He remembered his own funeral, and said that he had only been able to escape when his master died. Several other zombies were found wandering aimlessly in Northern Haiti around the same time.

A Haitian voodoo sorcerer is called a bokor. These practitioners of black magic have intimate knowledge of substances which can be used to alter the minds of people. They use a poisonous powder (coupe poudre) in order to alter the consciousness of their victims.

In 1985, Wade Davis, a Canadian ethnobotanist from Harvard University, visited Haiti in order to isolate the chemicals which are responsible for turning a person into a zombie. He wrote about his findings in The Serphent and the Rainbow and Passage of Darkness: The Ethnobiology of the Haitian Zombie. He acquired five samples of the zombie powder and, after isolating the deadly ingredients, he concluded that zombies do indeed exist. According to him the active ingredient in coupe poudre is tetradoxin that is found in the puffer fish. The chemical is hundreds of times more deadly then cyanide. Davis argues that while a tiny quantity is sufficient to kill, an even smaller dose would send a person into a death-like state,inducing total body paralysis, although the brain would still be alert. The victim would be pronounced dead and be buried.

Davis has isolated other ingredients in coupe poudre. The plants Datura metel and Datura stramonium, known as zombie "cucumber," and a stinging plant called Mucuna pruriens, cause hallucinations and amnesia. According to Davis, the effects of the drugs wear off within twelve hours, after which the victim is exhumed and fed another cocktail of mind-altering hallucinogens, including astropine and scopolamine.

However, Davis points out that the drugs alone are not sufficient to bend the will of the bokor. He argues that the cultural beliefs of Haiti is such that every person is socially conditioned to believe in and accept zombification as a reality. Whereas a westerner undergoing such treatment would undoubtedly traumatized and disoriented, the belief system of Haitian victims would cause them to respond to the process in a culturally appropriate way. In other words, they would become zombies and bend themselves to the will of their masters because they believe in and are psychologically susceptible to the process.

Zombification is used by the secrete Bizango societies, which control Haitian life,
as a way of maintaining order. Davis interviewed Clairvius Narcisse who believed that he had been punished for stealing land from his brother. Zombification is therefore the ultimate sanction, the equivalent of capital punishment in other countries.