The Man with the Empty Head

When I learned that I was going to move to Central Africa for three years, in the 1980s, I had little knowledge of the place and only about a month to prepare. So I picked up a few scholarly texts and read voraciously during the weeks prior to my departure: E. E. Evans-Pritchard’s Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande, Placide Tempels’s Bantu Philosophy, Colin Turnbull’s The Forest People, and Jan Vansina’s Kingdoms of the Savanna. I also read the only two novels about Africa that I could then find, Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Joseph Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness. All these books promised me that I was about to find myself in a very special part of the world, which certainly was the case. Taken together, they were the source of virtually everything I knew about Africa before I found myself in a remote village in northwestern Zaire, living alone in a mud hut whose thatch roof was infested with bats. Actually, I did have one inanimate roommate in the form of a shiny new Yamaha Enduro 250cc dirt bike, which would cause me near-death experiences on more than one occasion and in more ways than one.

Upon arrival in the village, my conversational French was fair and improving, but within a couple of months it was surpassed by my Lingala, the lingua franca of the region and a far more useful language there, one in which I still sometimes dream. Thankfully, this helped me make some very good friends in the local market, like a peanut merchant named Luta and, at a nearby Protestant mission station, a public health animateur (trainer) named Kundabu. They would often invite me over to eat dinner, to sip palm wine, and occasionally to visit their fishponds. And they and members of their family—and eventually almost everyone else in the village!—would regularly ask me for a ride somewhere, often with roosters or small vats of palm oil tied to the Enduro.

In retrospect, I have come to realize that my friends’ frequent rides on the back of my motorcycle were becoming a source of spiteful jealousy among some of the other villagers. Though it hadn’t dawned on me at the time (and I should have been clued in on this by Evans-Pritchard), I now think this was the source of my first experience with ndoki, sorcery.¹ It came to me in the form of a bundle of moistened, oiled herbs wrapped in a worn multicolored handkerchief that was fastened to the handle of the door to my hut. I had been away for two weeks, working in a distant village, and returned just before dark one day to discover the frightful thing. And I knew better than to touch it.

The author on a 250cc Yamaha Enduro, his iron horse, somewhere between Tandala and Bozene, Zaire, 1987. Photo by a stranger who was walking by.

It was a very good time to have friends who cared about me, especially since, in addition to being a market woman, Luta was a herbalist and healer, and since Kundabu owned one of the only shotguns in the village—plus his name means “Death is Wind” in the Ngbaka dialect. So I hopped back on the Enduro and made the short drive to his house, where one of Kundabu’s wives informed me that he was out in the forest at his fishpond. So I continued to Luta’s. Fortunately, she was home and glad to see me, despite my alarmed state. She listened to what I had to say, made me some strong local black coffee with a ton of sugar, told me to wait inside her hut, and then set off to my house to investigate. It wasn’t long before Luta returned with the bundle that had been hanging on my door, only now it was unraveled. She explained that it was harmless and only meant to scare me.

“The problem is that you live alone,” offered Luta. From the start of our relationship, I had the sense that she pitied me for my relative solitude, and the ndoki episode was evidently the last straw. So Luta invited me to live with her and her extended family nearby. I had been lonely and had grown tired of sweeping bat droppings out of my hut every day, so I gratefully accepted, thus becoming a member of a relatively large and shifting household in an equatorial African village. The Enduro would spend the rest of its nights in the village without me but with the bats.  In retrospect, the vehicle makes me think of “the iron horse” in Things Fall Apart, a symbol of modernity, colonialism, and cultural collision that portends the falling apart of things in the rural Igbo world about which Achebe wrote with such mastery and eloquence, in English but in the cadence of his native Igbo language, a language that was brought to the Caribbean by enslaved Africans:

“During the last planting season a white man appeared in their clan.”

“An albino,” suggested Okonkwo.

“He was not an albino. He was quite different.” He sipped his wine. “And he was riding an iron horse. The first people who saw him ran away, but he stood beckoning to them. In the end the fearless ones went near and even touched him. The elders consulted their Oracle and it told them that the strange man would break their clan and spread destruction among them.”²

In the novel, the white man is a Protestant missionary, and Protestant missions have done both good and harm throughout Africa, but that is a debate for another day.

Over the course of my residence at Luta’s home, I earnestly endeavored to participate in the economics and sustenance of our family unit—and I say “family” with much sincerity, for I was wholly embraced as a brother, a son, a nephew, and even an adoptive father. Thus, I occasionally borrowed Kundabu’s shotgun and tried hunting antelopes and monkeys in the bush with the older boys in the household, but usually we could afford only one shotgun shell and none of us had good aim. Hunting expeditions thus quickly became rare and futile. So I tried my hand at peanut farming, going into the fields with the matriarchs to swipe away weeds amid the sprouts with a machete, yet I proved inept at that, being hopelessly unable to distinguish sprout from weed. I was equally worthless at bartering in the marketplace, and gathering water was restricted to women, so those roles were out of the question, and I have always had an unshakable aversion to fishing.

Luta appreciated my intention to contribute to the household and suggested that I could be most useful by watching the children on Saturdays while she and the other adults hunted, fished, worked the fields, gathered water, or tended the market stalls. I gladly accepted. Thus, my Sabbaths in the Congo often consisted of sitting on a bamboo chair in the dirt yard, beneath a massive shady mango tree, sipping palm wine while either staring at the sky or watching the children play spirited matches of a kind of indigenous Subbuteo. In this game a small soccer pitch is traced out in the dirt and bottle caps are used as players. They are flicked with one’s fingers against a round seed, the ball, to score goals against one’s opponent.

Congolese children playing their version of Subbuteo in the author’s yard, Tandala, Zaire, 1987. Photo by the author.

Around midday on most Saturdays for over two years I saw the same old man saunter silently along Avenue Mulango, a dirt path flanked by palm trees and mud huts. I never knew his name or conversed with him, but he was tall, somewhat gaunt, and rather light skinned, and I do not recall ever seeing him walking or talking with anyone. Avenue Mulango leads from one of the most important roads connecting the Congo and Ubangi Rivers to the best hospital in the region, one run by American missionaries. Thus the sick, the suffering, the dying, and the dead would often pass by our house at all hours, and dreadful moaning and effervescent wailing were frequently echoing in our midst. This man was different, though, never uttering a word, let alone shrieking. But he seemed half dead, someone who in Haiti, where I later lived for six years, would likely be taken for a zombie. Everyone in the village was scared of him, so one day I decided to ask the children why.

Equateur province of Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of Congo. About 50 kilometers north of the city of Gemena is where the author lived and met the man with the empty head. | Map of Congo’s Equator province by JRC, European Commission is used under a CC BY 4.0 License.

I approached the game, which pitted Brazil against Zaire in the World Cup final (Zaire won, 4–1), and raised my question. “He is a ndoki,” the manager of Brazil answered, “and his head is empty, he is zoba.” The six or so spectators of the match, all of them youths under fourteen years old, nodded in agreement: “E, yango wana, azali ndoki ya solo.” (“Yes, that’s it, he is truly a sorcerer.”) They warned me never to shake the old man’s hand. This was advice that I certainly heeded, even though in Zaire you always shook everybody’s hand at all gatherings, and among the Ngbaka people this was done in an especially hearty fashion. On the following day after church, I had the chance to ask some of the women with whom I worshipped if they knew of this ndoki, and they confirmed what the children had told me. And in conversations with them and with other acquaintances in the market, I would sometimes hear the word zoba used in reference to this seemingly odd elderly fellow.

Zoba basically means “stupid” in numerous Bantu languages, including Kikongo, which is widely spoken in the Central Africa. Most ndoki are well trained and quite focused, entrepreneurial individuals, in my experience, and thus surely not zoba, but this old man was a special case, I suppose. He was both ndoki and zoba—or at least he had been ndoki-ed into being zoba. While stupidity is quite regretted in Central Africa, it is not always something with which one is simply born, as it also might be the result of sorcery. I now interpret this to mean that people in my village used the word zoba in reference to the sorcerer not just because he was stupid but because he was ensorcelled, in a contagious kind of way, and had been largely stripped of agency, much like a zombie, and that his form of sorcery was one that he channeled rather than orchestrated.

Zombies! Zombies! Zombies!

It’s no secret that zombies, spooky or otherwise, are all the rage in popular culture and media—not just in American culture, but worldwide. Just type “zombie” into eBay’s search prompt, and a total of 398,486 purchasable items appear for sale: from knives and tee shirts, to skateboards and chia pets; from infant onesies and zombie apocalypse survival kits, to car decals and retractable ID badge holders; from potato chips and salt shakers, to mousepads and the incomparable “midnight zombie tobacco grinder card.”³ Zombie films like Zombieland (2009) and Resident Evil Afterlife (2010) grossed millions of dollars on their opening weekends, while World War Z (2013) eclipsed all others in grossing over half a billion. Furthermore, there is almost no end to the number of video games being played by throngs of people at any given moment, in which zombies must be avoided, mowed down, or cured in order to win. (We discuss zombie movies and video games in detail in later chapters.) Correspondingly, a notable spike in cinematic interest occurred between 1990 and 2000, when more than 300 zombie movies were made, and in the interim more than 200 books with the word “zombie” sauntering somewhere in the title have been published.⁴

But zombies in such capitalistic/creative marketing and entertainment ventures have almost nothing to do with zombies (zonbi yo) in Haitian history and culture. They reflect a great deal more about American “sociophobics” and profit motives than about Afro-Caribbean culture.⁵ Though we know that the idea of the zombie was most notably brought from Haiti to the United States by American literati like Zora Neale Hurston and William Seabrook—and by returning marines (most of whom were not fluent in Haitian Creole) during and just after the first U.S. Occupation of Haiti (1915–1934)—we know much less about whence the Caribbean idea of the zombie originally derived.⁶ This chapter explores the African origins of Haiti’s zombic culture, looking in particular at the likeliest West and/or Central African influences on one of the most haunting features of Caribbean life and worldview.

Several theories have been advanced as to the origins of the word zonbi (pl.: zonbi yo) in Haitian Creole and, by extension, the deepest roots of zombic culture in the Caribbean or Africa. At a 2015 conference on zombies at Duke University, for example, Patrick Sylvain, a Boston-based Haitian Vodou priest and scholar, argued that the term’s etymology could be traced to the Native American Taino word zemi (spirit). The American anthropologist of Kongo culture Wyatt MacGaffey disagreed, attributing the term to the Kikongo word nzambi (spirit or god). Elizabeth McAlister seems to agree with MacGaffey about the Kongo roots of one particular aspect of Haitian zombic culture, offering that the zonbi astral, about which she has so marvelously written, derives at least in part “from Kongolese religious thought.”⁷ We will briefly explore these possibilities, but first let us take an etymological journey into the heart of zombieland.

The Zombie and the Casanova

Dubbed, for his legendary libertinage “The Casanova of the Seventeenth Century,”8 Pierre-Corneille Blessebois (1646–1700) was the first European writer to ever use the word zombi in print. It appears throughout his 1697 novel Le zombi du Grand Pérou ou La Comtesse de Cocagne, his twelfth and last publication. A native of Verneuil, Normandy, Blessebois changed his given first name, “Paul-Alexis,” to “Pierre-Corneille” in 1660 and renounced his Protestant faith.⁹ He was a mysterious personage who was eventually arrested for arson in Alençon, having torched his own mother’s house in an effort to bilk an insurance company. Though subsequently confined and presumably shackled in prison, he managed to entice a wealthy aristocratic woman named Marthe Le Hayer to fall madly in love with him and not only post his bail but open her bank account to her paramour. Once liberated, the gallivanting arsonist quickly pillaged Le Hayer’s fortune and scurried off, for which Blessebois was again arrested. He was sentenced to banishment in the French Caribbean slave plantation colony of Guadalupe, as “an invalid,” in 1686.¹⁰

Shortly after arriving in Guadalupe, Blessebois was auctioned off as an indentured servant to one of the island’s wealthiest planters, Monsieur Dupont, and it did not take long before the exile’s libertine excesses and occultism landed him once again before a magistrate. In 1690, the colony’s royal court reached a verdict against Blessebois, probably for the crime of necromancy.¹¹ He was found guilty and received a sentence that required him to “publicly acknowledge the crime by appearing half-naked, torch in hand before the Church and the palace door, asking pardon before God, the King and Justice, on pain of being hung and strangled on the second offense.”¹² The court’s deliberations had actually begun in 1688, and by the time the verdict was handed down, Blessebois had, unsurprisingly, vanished. What became of him after that is unknown. Fitting into the genre of romantic eroticism, Le zombi du Grand Pérou would be republished anonymously seven years later in France and would be attributed to Blessebois in 1829.¹³

Inner title leaf of the first edition of Blessebois’s classic 1697 zombie novel. | Blessebois’s Le zombi du Grand Perrou by gallica.bnf.fr/Bibliothèque nationale de France is in the public domain.

What kinds of zombies are portrayed in Blessebois’s book? Hailed by Guillaume Apollinaire as the first French Caribbean novel,¹⁴ Le zombi du Grand Pérou also offers the first historical glimpse of just what a zombie was in Guadeloupe, or anywhere else in the Caribbean. So it is of considerable importance to the central question raised in this chapter: Where do zombies come from? According to Doris Garraway: “In portraying the creolized spirit world as a palimpsest of tropes of mixed cultural origin . . .  Blessebois’s text forces the modern reader to reexamine assumptions about the meanings and derivation of zombie beliefs in the Caribbean.”¹⁵

The earliest examination of zombic derivation in Blessebois is that of Marc de Montifaud (1845–1912), the nom de plume of Marie-Amélie Chartroule de Montifaud. In her preface to the nineteenth-century edition of Le zombi du Grand Pérou (Notice sur les harems noirs ou les moeurs galantes aux colonies), she alludes to, and ultimately rejects, the possibility of Kongolese cornerstones of early Afro-Caribbean zombic culture. Montifaud opines that Blessebois’s “Zombi is quite different. This imaginary personage on which rests the rather vague intrigue of Blessebois’s novel, is nothing other . . . than the vulgar Revenant of our Breton peasants.” Montifaud also argues that Blessebois derived some of his zombic ideas from Paul Scarron’s 1652–1657 novel Le Roman comique. A main character is a mistress who receives a potion that she believes makes her invisible, but it does not. Scarron drew upon a rich tradition of the trope of the “invisible mistress” in golden age Spanish literature.¹⁶

Nonetheless, the revenant of French folklore found a receptive audience among the enslaved Africans in Guadeloupe who sacrificed animals following funeral services so that the recently deceased would not return to haunt the living, or that they would not “‘do the zombi.’”¹⁷ Moreover, African beliefs “often were implanted in the spirit of some colonists,” so the earliest notion of the zombie in the Caribbean was already quite hybridized. And, as explored later in this chapter, this notion most likely picked up layers of valences as history continued to unfold.¹⁸

Though there is no evidence that Montifaud had ever been to Africa or the Caribbean, she did research African religions. Her reading of Blessebois is insightful on many levels. The notion of the zombie in Blessebois’s novel is indeed “rather vague,” and hybrid undercurrents in the book indicate that although the term zombie did not originate in France, most of the zombic ideas in the novel did. The “maker” of the zombie, after all, is a white Frenchman (Blessebois, with a rather obvious pseudonym, “Monsieur C_________”), and the zombie herself is described as being “the color of snow.”¹⁹ Montifaud asserts that Blessebois’s zombie is based entirely upon ideas drawn from European occultism. But these ideas resonated meaningfully with Central African funerary customs in the Caribbean.

Unfortunately, Blessebois’s representation of the zombie provides us with little to no insight into African thought about the undead, so it is quite difficult to gauge here the possible African or Amerindian roots of the notion in the late-seventeenth-century Caribbean. Furthermore, the Breton revenant alluded to by Montifaud is not invisible, whereas Blessebois’s zombie is. And though invisibility is not elemental to the “living dead” kind of zombie in Haitian culture (zonbi kò kadav), “in the Creole of the lesser Antilles, however, the term zombie is commonly defined as ‘phantom,’ ‘ghost,’ or ‘errant soul’ and refers more specifically to malevolent yet largely invisible nocturnal spirits,” Garraway writes.²⁰ Enslaved Africans and Creoles only rarely enter Blessebois’s novel. When they do, we are given no sense of their understanding of the ravaging zombie of Grand Pérou, though they seem to know what a zombie is and they are frightened by the creature. In one scene they act to protect their white “master,” the marquis, from “le zombi.”

Here is what one may glean about seventeenth-century zombic culture in the French Caribbean from the book: The story is semi-autobiographical, and the real identity of every character has been convincingly demonstrated by literary scholars. The narrator is none other than Blessebois himself, “Mr. C.”, whose reputation for dabbling in the occult preceded him to Guadeloupe. This seductive trait is what draws the Countess of Cocagne to him in the first place:

Good and evil are both at your command, and you ignite love and hatred with the same ease with which other people light a torch . . . . you are a magician, and you have the Devil subjected to your command, and I ask of you some help from that art so that I may regain the Marquis’s affection.²¹

Portrayed as the sexually insatiable mistress of a wealthy plantation owner, the countess wishes to terrify her paramour into being less abusive and more amorous toward her. So she asks Mr. C. to make her invisible one night so that she can go on a rampage in the duke’s household, posing as the zombie of Grand Pérou.

Initially the sorcerer denies having such powers, but he soon realizes that he can gain sexual favors from the beautiful countess should he oblige her. So he pretends to have the mojo to empower her “to do the zombie.” She is gorgeous and lustful, after all, and Mr. C. is decidedly a letch, as well as a necromancer, so this is a golden opportunity for him. But that is pretty much the extent of what zombification means in the novel: becoming invisible and thereby able to sneak into a house at night to terrify its occupants turbulently and noisily. There is no blood, no corporeal decay, no hunger for brains, no slave labor, no pending apocalypse. Just invisibility, violence, fear, and a lot of shattered plates and toppled furniture. The problem is that the countess, when “doing the zombie,” is actually visible but does not realize it. On one of the two occasions that she storms into the marquis’s mansion, she becomes so violent that she nearly kills a man named Laforest, who is actually Mr. C.’s accomplice.

Later in the novel another form of zombi is introduced, the zombi de ronde (round zombie), with whom the allegedly nymphomaniacal countess also seeks an intimate encounter. This, once again, spurs her to seek out the services of Mr. C., of course, and the libidinous sorcerer obliges and arranges for this to happen. He instructs the countess to strip naked and to keep her eyes shut while lying down on the banks of the Grand Pérou River. In a dissolute turn of events, in a saga already replete with debauchery, two of Mr. C.’s accomplices arrive to sexually ravage the countess on the riverbank, and they prick her buttocks with pins. She believes that all of this is the work of the undead and not of real, living men, that this is what having sex with round zombies is actually like.

Thus, the zombie takes multiple forms in Blessebois’s novel, none of them closely related to either the zonbi of Haitian culture or the ghoulish darling of American cinema and popular culture, as Sarah Lauro writes: “There are no soulless embodied zombies in this text, though the word is used at various points to mean ‘un fantôme, un esprit, un sorcier,’ as the author of the introduction writes.” Lauro delineates these forms as “spirits that walk around having left their bodies, resting elsewhere, charms that render the person’s body invisible, and maleficent entities that pester and can lead one to do evil,” as well as “flying zombies that also carry torches.”²²

“Yet,” adds Garraway, “the particular powers attached to the zombie motif in Blessebois are distinct from those of European traditions and arguably bear the imprint of other belief systems, not least because of the zombie name.”²³ Over and above any possible linguistic corollaries in the Kikongo dialect, there are ideas in Kongolese religious thought that seem to resonate with some of the forms that the zombie takes in Blessebois. Despite Montifaud’s rejection of this possibility, it is worth reconsidering the question here. Although Christianity took hold in Central Africa even before the transatlantic slave trade reached the western Congo Basin, it is likely that the notion of raising the dead was already in circulation in the region. In Kikongo, the word tumbulia precisely means that: raising the dead. Another zombic-like notion is reflected in the term vonda o tulu, which means “to throw into a deathlike sleep.” Someone in such a state is said to be fwa o tulu, “in a deathlike sleep.”²⁴ Also, in eighteenth-century Saint-Domingue (which would become the independent Republic of Haiti in 1804), Kikongo was widely spoken and the word for “death” was essentially the same, gallicized as foua.²⁵ These valences resonate with at least one form of Blessebois’s zombie, the zonbi of Haitian folklore, and even with the zombie of Hollywood. But before claiming this is definitive evidence of key Central African influences on early Caribbean zombic culture, we should consider the ethnic composition of the African population of Guadeloupe in the late seventeenth century.

Slavery in the French Caribbean in the Seventeenth Century

Considering the ethnic background of enslaved Africans in seventeenth-century Guadeloupe sheds light on the etymology of zombi as Blessebois understood it and early zombic culture in the colonial French Caribbean. Blessebois seems to have brought his zombic ideas with him from Europe, but the word zombi was not European and almost certainly African. Unfortunately, “before 1714 . . . we have only fragmentary information about French slaving activities,” as James Pritchard, David Eltis, and David Richardson demonstrate.²⁶ By one estimate, most of the over 35,000 enslaved Africans shipped by the French across the Atlantic in the seventeenth century derived from the Bight of Benin. Four historical factors further complicate efforts to understand African ethnicity in seventeenth-century Guadeloupe:

1. Many slaves brought to the French Caribbean colonies were delivered by British and Dutch ships.
2. French raids on British colonies were the source of many slaves toiling on French sugar plantations.
3. Many people enslaved by the French were purchased from British, Danish, Dutch, Portuguese, and Spanish American colonies.
4. Most slaves arriving in Guadeloupe had first been brought to Martinique, which was the leading destination of enslaved people brought to the French Caribbean during this period.²⁷

Dead and dying African slaves being tossed into the Atlantic as a storm gathers. J. M. W. Turner, The Slave Ship, 1840. | Slaves tossed overboard during a storm at sea by J. M. W. Turner is in the public domain.

In any case, an estimated 5,172 slaves were brought from Africa to Guadeloupe between 1640 and 1700, where by then the total enslaved population was roughly 6,855.²⁸ Which part of Africa they hailed from cannot be said with any precision, but we do know that during this period “over half of the French slave vessels sailed by far the shortest of the triangular trade’s roundtrips – the one via Senegambia.”²⁹ The Transatlantic Slave Trade Database, an immeasurably important historical project directed by Eltis, records only seven slave ships arriving in Guadeloupe between 1652 and 1683. Two of these ships offloaded slaves from the Bight of Benin, two from “Senegambia and Offshore Atlantic,” and one each from the Gold Coast, the “Bight of Biafra and Gulf of Guinea Islands,” and “West Central Africa and St. Helena.” As for Martinique, between 1655 and 1693 twenty-five slave ships arrived, ten from the “Bight of Benin and Gulf of Guinea Islands,” four from the Bight of Biafra, three each from “Other Africa” and “West Central Africa and St. Helena,” two each from Senegambia and the Gold Coast, and one from “Windward.”³⁰

Since throughout the early history of transatlantic slavery Martinique was the transferring hub for more than half of the slaves in Guadeloupe, it is reasonable to combine the shipping figures of the two colonies to enhance our consideration of African culture and ethnicity in Guadeloupe at the time Blessebois wrote Le Zombi de Grand Pérou. Thus, of a total of thirty-two recorded slave ships that arrived, twenty-five carried victims of slavery from these places: the Bight of Benin (twelve), the Bight of Biafra (six), Senegambia (four), and the Gold Coast (three).  During this period, only four slave ships on record arrived in Martinique or Guadeloupe with victims from “West Central Africa and St. Helena,” and still fewer ships arrived with slaves from the Windward Islands or “Other Africa.” In all, between 1651 and 1700 the inventories count 3676 enslaved Africans brought directly to Guadeloupe and 15,427 to Martinique. Given that a considerable majority of ships that brought enslaved people across the Atlantic had abducted them in West Africa, it is safe to say that most slaves in seventeenth-century Guadeloupe were West African, though a significant minority were Central African.

For the entire French Caribbean, meanwhile, slave ship inventories in the seventeenth century report that 29,042 African slaves were transported to the colonies, with their regions of embarkation broken down as follows:³¹

________________________

Senegambia                  11075     38%

Bight of Benin              9033     31%

Bight of Biafra              3607     13%

West Central Africa    3070      11%

Gold Coast                     106         4%

Sierra Leone                 406         1%

________________________

This brief analysis of the early history of the transatlantic slave trade in Guadeloupe has clear ramifications for any consideration of the question “Where do zombies come from?” Most obviously, it tips the balance in favor of a West African, over a Central African, origin for the word zombi. Yet, interestingly enough, during the entire two-day zombie conference at Duke University, only Central African and Native American origins of the word were offered. However, the argument for Central African roots of the word zombie should be brought into question by the ethnic demographics of seventeenth-century Guadeloupe’s enslaved population, which indicate that only 11 percent of the colony’s slaves derived from West Central Africa and St. Helena. Furthermore, between 1671 and 1685, no slave ships arrived in the French Caribbean from West Central Africa, meaning that the influence of Kikongo or other Central African languages on the emergence of Creole language in the French Caribbean was minimal.

The predominance of West African slaves in seventeenth-century Martinique and Guadeloupe aside, caution is warranted before embarking on an etymological exploration of the term zombie there, because these kidnapped Africans “must have come from extremely diverse backgrounds.”³² Still, during the last three decades of the century, as the French became more active in the slave trade and decreased their reliance on Dutch shipments, “there came a pronounced shift north in the provenance of slaves sent to French colonies.” As a result, during this period some 80 percent of slaves exported to Guadeloupe and other French Caribbean possessions came from the Bight of Benin. The vast majority of them departed from Ouidah and Senegambia, and most others departed from Saint-Louis and Gorée.³³ Though West Central Africa would, over time, become the point of embarkation for most slaves traded by the French throughout the colonial era—an estimated 1.25 million, or “one-eighth of the total traffic”³⁴—in the seventeenth century this was far from being the case. We should thus look to West Africa for the etymological root of the word zombie.

African Languages in Seventeenth-Century Guadeloupe

By 1700, some 10,000 enslaved Africans had been imported to Guadeloupe,³⁵ the majority shipped from Ouidah and Senegambia. What were the principal languages spoken among this population? The answer to this question will shed light on the original meaning of the word zombie as understood in the seventeenth-century Caribbean, particularly in Guadeloupe. At the beginning of the transatlantic slave trade in West Africa, the port town of Ouidah was part of the Kingdom of Hueda (hence its name, also spelled Whydah, c. 1580–1728), and the predominant language of the region was (and remains today) a cluster of the Ewe, Gen (Gbe), Aja, and Fon dialects (EGAF), which has been spoken there for centuries.³⁶

Located on the Bight of Benin, because of its centrality to the transatlantic slave trade, this part of Africa came to be known among Europeans as the “Slave Coast,” and by 1727 it had been subsumed into the Kingdom of Dahomey. So it is with the EGAF language group that any attempt to understand the etymology of the word zombie must begin. This is not to deny other possible sources of the word, nor to gloss over likely multicultural, evolutionary layers of valences to zombic culture over the course of colonial Caribbean history, but in light of seventeenth-century slave demographics, the term probably originated from this language cluster in Dahomey.

Through her critical reading of Le zombi du Grand Pérou and a careful consideration of Blessebois’s representation of the zombie, Garraway offers several compelling suggestions for African etymological sources of this “frightful spirit entity in the colonial imagination.”³⁷ Rejecting as unlikely the suggestion that the term derives from an elision of the article and noun les ombres (the shadows) in French, Garraway lists the following African terms as likelier sources of zombie, as it is spelled in French:

• Nvumbi – an Angolan word for “body without a soul”
• Ndzumbi – a Mitsogho (Gabon) word for “corpse”
• Mvumbi – Kikongo for “‘inner invisible man’ or ‘soul’”
• Nzambi – Kikongo for god or spirit
• Zanbibi – Ewe Fon for “night bogeyman,” deriving from “‘zan’ meaning night, and ‘bibi’¸ meaning ‘ghost’ or ‘bogeyman.’”³⁸

Lauro’s “hypothesis is that the unnamed ancestral myth closest to what we today consider a ‘zombie’ hailed from West Central Africa, where, in close proximity, there is a region called Zombo, a deity called Nzambi, and a Congo practice of creating bottle fetishes called Zumbi.”³⁹ Both Garraway and Lauro affirm that the term zombi likely has a multivalent creolized root system that was inflected not just via African etymology but also via Native American spirituality and European demonology, for “at least three distinct occult systems present in the colonial Caribbean (European, Aja-Fon, and Kongo) could have interacted” in the emergence of the idea^.40 Though Garraway offers a more nuanced reading of history than Lauro and lends more credence to West African zombic stimuli, I believe that they both overestimate the Central African influences on the earliest linguistic iteration of the zombie, as my deeper explorations of African ethnicity in seventeenth-century Guadeloupe suggest.⁴¹

Besides the revenant, some European layers may have been introduced much later, however, while the rapid and tragic decline of the Taino population surely compromised any Native American influence on zombic culture in the colonial Caribbean. At any rate, there is really nothing about a zemi (Taino concept of “spirit”) that would seem to be part of the zombie. So we arrive at the very beginning here and advance a West African word, zanbibi, as the most likely etymological source of the word zombie in Afro-Caribbean culture, although other African dialects certainly helped ensure the emergence of the region’s zombic culture, one upon which additional forms of signification would be heaped over the course of the colonial period.

The Zombie’s Haitian Debut

It is widely presumed that the idea of the zombie has its origins in Haiti, but judging from textual historical evidence, that is not entirely true. Indeed, it was nearly a hundred years after Blessebois first wrote about a zombie in Guadeloupe that the word first appeared in any French text written in or referencing Saint-Domingue. The word was surely in circulation earlier in the colony, however, as at least two places carried the name Zombi: “Trou Zombi, in the Parish of Cavaillion, and Boucan Zombie, in the Parish of Arcahaie.”⁴² But these place names didn’t appear in print, as far as I know, until 1829, and I’ve uncovered no explanation as to exactly why or when they received these names. (Some ethnographic fieldwork might help answer this question.) By 1791, furthermore, there was a trading ship that had been christened “Zombie” ported in Cape Haitian, Saint-Domingue’s most important city, which sailed to Salem, Massachusetts. The sloop was then steered to nearby Beverly by Captain Knight, per the “Marine Intelligence” section of the July 21, 1791 edition of the Salem Gazette. A shipping announcement published seven years later in the Antigua Gazette informs that Le Zombi was “a French privateer Schooner . . . of 8 guns and 72 men.”⁴³

Though rarely, if ever, cited by scholars writing on the history of the zombie, the first instance of the word that I have found published in French concerning Saint-Domingue appears in a short travelogue written by a certain M. de C… and published in the Mercure de France in 1788. The author recounts his friendship with one of the few remaining Native Americans in the colony’s north, a place called Limbe. Okano was a Taino chief who was quite popular among the local African slaves, but one day he simply disappeared. M. de C… was paying a visit to Okano’s compound, and though “his hammock was hanging and his calabashes were all in order,” the chief was nowhere to be found. A few days later, the Frenchman returned to find “the air filled with diverse noises over the death of this unhappy Indian. The Blacks who loved him lost themselves in conjecture. Some held that zombies had taken him; others held that he had killed himself; while many believed, more plausibly, that he had been devoured by sharks or caimans.”⁴⁴

Whereas the footnote in M. de C…’s original text is very short, it is curiously expanded in an English translation that appeared in September of 1788 in Universal Magazine: “The Zombies make a great figure in the superstition of the Negroes. Like the Larvae of the ancients, they are supposed to be spirits of dead wicked men, that are permitted to wander, and torment the living.”⁴⁵ That zombies might kill is as interesting in this footnote as is the comparison to the Larvae, who in ancient Greek and Roman mythology were “the ghostly souls of those who had lived evil lives.” These “hideous looking creatures” were “constantly hungry”; the Larvae (more commonly known as Lemures) “roamed at night searching for food.”⁴⁶ Though this sounds very much like a zombie, living an evil life was not at all requisite to becoming one in Haiti, so I doubt that it was in Saint-Domingue either.

Writing in the colony at around the same time as M. de C…, in 1789 Médéric Louis Moreau de Saint-Méry uses the term zombi, in passing, in the first volume of his famous Description topographique, physique, civile, politique, et historique de la partie française de l’isle Saint-Domingue, toward the end of a section titled “The Creole Slave.”⁴⁷ This section’s title is somewhat misleading, as there is much discussion about Africa and Africans here (“Creole” was a term used for enslaved peoples of African descent who were born and raised in the Caribbean.) Moreau also seems somewhat lost as to whether he is writing about Creole or African slaves. This section of the text is historically significant for containing what is likely the first reference to Vodou in any published Francophone source from Saint-Domingue. Moreau uses the spelling vaudoux for the name of a serpent cult, its members, and their dance, discussing at some length a communal dance ritual whose purpose is the veneration of a snake.

For our purposes, it is deeply meaningful that Moreau’s solitary mention of the zombie is not contained in his discussion of Vodou but in his discussion of African sexuality. Following his description of the vaudoux cult, Moreau covers forms of African and Creole dance, both religious and secular, before reductively and racistly explaining that slaves in Saint-Domingue would stop at nothing to pursue a sexual encounter:

The black who contains in his veins the fire of a scorching climate goes sometimes great distances to carry his desires to his beloved. There is no obstacle whatsoever that his passion cannot overcome; neither the fatigue of that day nor the fear of next; nor pathways, nor flooding rivers; nothing can stop him.

We read here how sexually desirous slaves would signal their needs for potential paramours by whistling before venturing out into the fearsome darkness in search of their presumably likewise keen partners. It is in this context that Moreau refers to dreadful supernatural creatures that lurk in the night, like the zombie. He writes that somehow even this fear cannot deter the “lustful and lecherous” enslaved Black person.

Though Moreau insightfully writes of the African origins of the so-called vaudoux cult, suggesting that it derives from the Arada people from Ouidah, he does not do so regarding the zombi. Here, in fact, he says little, but what he does write is of great importance, especially in a single footnote that defines zombi: “Creole word that means spirit, revenant.”⁴⁸ One can perhaps surmise from this that the African origins of the word were not clear to Moreau, though he implies that the term was widely known in Saint-Domingue at the time. He offers four things of import to our inquiry: 1) that the word zombi was “Creole” and not African, 2) that the zombi was both a spirit and a revenant, 3) that the zombi was to be feared mostly at night, and 4) that, in addition to the zombi, Black people in Saint-Domingue “who are otherwise courageous, fear ghosts and werewolves.”

Thus, the zombi in Saint-Domingue was a feared creature that took the form of the spirit of someone returned from the dead and was evidently more active at night than during the daytime. This fearsomeness and association with death and the night further suggest that the Fon concept of zanbibi has been the most influential African notion on early Caribbean zombic culture. In addition to multiple West African inflections, there might also have been Central African influences on the emergence of the zombie in Haiti, but they were ancillary. However, these influences have surely added layers of meaning over time; this is my central concluding argument later in the chapter. As will be discussed at length in Chapter Eight, this is especially relevant to the notion of zonbi astral in Haitian Vodou, which is basically the soul or part of the soul of a dead person that is trapped in a vessel and put to work by a sorcerer.

It is important to add that culture is very complicated and does not transfer or diffuse in any uniform fashion. The pioneering scholar of the “survival” of African cultural forms in the Americas, and one of the first to formally research Haitian Vodou, Melville J. Herskovits,⁴⁹ has been criticized by Ira Lowenthal, a later anthropologist whose experience in Haiti is much deeper. For Lowenthal, Herskovits presumes that culture is “a collection of traits, each of which ‘looks’ either European or African. That these elements are integrated into a meaningful system of belief and ritual, and that this integration may itself be the most significant issue of the historical process underlying Haitian culture, are secondary considerations in this type of analysis.”⁵⁰ Following Lowenthal, Karen Richman and I write:

Moreover, the elements purported to merge in the syncretic process are too often imagined in scholarly discourse to have been parts of implausibly stable, uncontested, and coherent wholes before certain of their elements were selected for syncretic re-combination; more recent historiographies of relevant European, African, and American cultures have revealed this position to be misleading.⁵¹

Lowenthal was a student of the great Caribbeanist anthropologist Sydney Mintz, so it is unsurprising that he would take umbrage at Herskovits’s notion of culture and neglect of the complexities of the processes of “creolization” in the Americas, which Mintz had theorized brilliantly and alternatively in his 1976 book with Richard Price.⁵²

Such theoretical debates aside, had the term zombie originally carried clear Central African elucidations in Saint-Domingue, it would surely have made its way into Louis-Narcisse Baudry des Lozières’s French-Kikongo dictionary, Dictionnaire ou Vocabulaire Congo. According to James Sweet, this is “one of only a handful of surviving African-language vocabularies in the Americas writ large, and the only known example from Haiti.”⁵³ This remarkable thirty-nine-page document is nested in Baudry’s 1803 travelogue Second voyage à Louisiane, in which the exiled French slaveholder recalls having learned enough Kikongo to converse with some of his African slaves while living in Saint-Domingue. The word zombi is simply not there (though zoba is, spelled ioba), nor anything like it. Neither are the ideas that Blessebois and Moreau worked with. To be sure, ndoki and nzambi have entries in Baudry’s dictionary, but there is nothing to suggest that they were related to anything like the zombie as it has historically been understood in Haiti.⁵⁴

Cemetery in France. | A cemetery in France by Pierre-Yves Beaudouin is used under a CC BY-SA 4.0 License.

In their discussions of the zombie, Blessebois and Moreau both seem to have in mind the revenant of Breton folklore, whether by way of cultural comparison or literary imagination. So we may reasonably surmise that there has always been some measure of European influence on Caribbean zombic culture. In comparing Blessebois and Moreau, in an effort to understand the zombie’s Caribbean origins, it is, once again, important to consider the ethnic composition of the enslaved population that surrounded the two French writers. Blessebois’s Guadeloupe of the late seventeenth century had a majority West African slave population, whereas by the time Moreau wrote the word zombie in Saint-Domingue, most of the slaves there were Central African. The idea of the zombie thus surely reflected much greater Kongolese influence in Moreau’s world than in Blessebois’s.⁵⁵ Yet neither of them writes of any African religious influence on the notion, only reflecting African fears of the zombie. Therefore, besides the word zombi, the key similarities in how this idea is treated in the two texts are the themes of darkness and fear, which are both key elements of the zanbibi. Given the historical evidence, it appears that the zanbibi was the first Caribbean zombie, infused with Breton ideas of the revenant. The foundational notion from Senegambia also surely became hybridized amid the dozens of African dialects and ideas about souls, the dead, dying, and their return then circulating in the Caribbean. Could one of them have been zoba?

Conclusion

Let us return to the man with the empty head in Zaire. In a previous section, I stated my case that the Fon word zanbibi is most likely the thickest etymological taproot of the zombie. And yet, how is it that zanbibi’s first syllable might have gotten linguistically supplanted by the long o in zonbi, whereas African words in Haitian Creole more often contain alterations to consonants and not vowels? I think here, for instance, of bunda, which derives from the Kikongo mvunda (both meaning large, round buttocks), while the widespread Bantu word for person, muntu, has kept the vowel sound in Creole’s moun. Interestingly enough, none of the African terms, whether from the Fon, Yoruba, or Kikongo, that have been reasonably suggested as the source of the word zonbi in Creole has a long o in its first syllable. This is where the man with the empty head might come in, for he is zoba, or at least he was in 1988, when he silently, yet repeatedly, distracted me from the Subbuteo matches on those Saturday afternoons in a Central African village.

Finally, a word on speed. At the Duke University conference on zombies, Maria Pramaggiore delivered a wonderful paper exploring the question of when the zombie sped up—how is it, in other words, that the sauntering, catatonic creature of the early films White Zombie and I Walked with a Zombie morphed into the frenetic, bloodthirsty acrobat portrayed in recent video games and in films like Resident Evil, House of the Dead, and World War Z?⁵⁶ I conclude here by flipping this question on its empty head: The first zombie on record was in fact fast, the one described in Blessebois’s classic novel at the end of the seventeenth century. One hundred years later, Moreau’s account says nothing about the zombie’s speed or mobility, but subsequently, and through the earliest zombie films, we’re gripped by a persistently slow creature, perhaps one whose pace has been slackened by the zoba. This may be a speculative conclusion, but it should be confirmed that, like virtually all elements of Afro-Creole cultures in the Americas, the zombie surely has a multitude of linguistic, agentival, and religious origins.

Notes

1. In Lingala, ndoki signifies sorcery in general or an individual sorcerer. In Zaire in the 1980s, it had also been adopted in the vernacular as something “amazing,” “far out,” or “awesome.” ↵
2. Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart. New York: Anchor, 1959, 138. ↵
3. http://www.ebay.com/itm/V-SYNDICATE-MIDNIGHT-ZOMBIE-GRINDER-CARD-TOBACCO-HERB-SPICE-CREDIT-CARD-/251927975005?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item3aa813d45d, last accessed August 10, 2015. ↵
4. Daniel W. Drezner, Theories of International Politics and Zombies, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015, 2–3. ↵
5. David Scruton defines sociophobics as “the study of human fears as they occur and are experienced in the context of the sociocultural systems humans have created,” like, for instance, the culture of zombie films. David L. Scruton, “The Anthropology of an Emotion,” in David L. Scruton (ed.), Sociophobics: The Anthropology of Fear, Boulder, CO: Westview, 1986, 7–49, 10. On the sociophobics of zombie films in particular, see Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr., Back from the Dead: Remakes of the Romero Zombie Films as Markers of Their Times, Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2011. We return at length to sociophobics in Chapter Twelve of this book. ↵
6. On the first U.S. military occupation of Haiti, see Mary A. Renda, Taking Haiti: Military Occupation and the Culture of Imperialism, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001. Renda (19) observes that the American obsession with the zombie began in 1929 with the publication of William Seabrook’s bestseller The Magic Island. “In the next decade and a half, Ethel Mermen sang ‘Katie Went to Haiti,’ Edna Taft wrote A Puritan in Voodoo Land, Orson Wells’s popular radio show, The Shadow, featured Haitian characters and settings, and Hollywood served up films like White Zombie and I Walked with a Zombie.” While Seabrook’s sensationalist travelogue did indeed contribute to the emergence of a veritable zombie craze in the United States, the word and the idea were already known in this country, as Ann Kordas demonstrates. Ann Kordas, “New South, New Immigrants, New Women, New Zombies,” in Christopher M. Moreman and Cory James Rushton (eds.), Race, Oppression and the Zombie: Essays on Cross-Cultural Appropriations of the Caribbean Traditions, Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2011, 15–30. Seabrook, it should be noted, was not formally involved in the U.S. military occupation of Haiti, but the occupation brought Haiti to his attention and made his visit there in 1927 possible. He had previously written fantastic stories about Islam and West Africa, where he actually engaged in a stint of cannibalism, so he was predisposed to seek out and find the fantastic in Haiti, even without speaking Creole. Also on Seabrook, see Anonymous, “Mumble Jumble,” Time 36, 11, September 9, 1940. Three former Marines who authored accounts of Vodou in Haiti were Faustus Wirkus, A. J. Burks, and John Houston Craige. More on this in Chapter Seven. ↵
7. Elizabeth McAlister, “A Sorcerer’s Bottle: The Visual Art of Magic in Haiti,” in Donald J. Cosentino (ed.), The Sacred Arts of Haitian Vodou, Los Angeles: UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History, 1995, 310. ↵
8. Frédéric Lachèvre, Le Casanova du XVIIe siècle: Pierre Corneille Blessebois, Paris: Champion, 1927. ↵
9. Doris Garraway suggests that it was not until 1687 that Blessebois denounced his faith, though it is certainly possible, given his riotous exploits, that he did so on more than one occasion. Doris L. Garraway, The Libertine Colony: Creolization in the Early French Caribbean, Durham: Duke University Press, 2005, 174. ↵
10. Ibid. ↵
11. Marc de Montifaud, “Notice sur les harems noirs ou les moeurs galantes aux colonies,” in Pierre-Corneille Blessebois, Le zombi du Grand Pérou, Bruxelles: LaCroix, 1877, i–xxxiii, xxiv. ↵
12. Garraway, The Libertine Colony, 174–175. ↵
13. Ibid., 175. ↵
14. Guillaume Apollinaire, L’Œuvre de Pierre-Corneille Blessebois, Paris: Bibliothèque des Curieux, 1921. ↵
15. Garraway, The Libertine Colony, 191. ↵
16. On this earlier tradition, see Frederick A. de Armas, “Invisible Mistress,” in Janet Peréz and Marueen Ihrie (eds.), The Feminist Encyclopedia of Spanish Literature, Westport, CT: Greenwood, 304–306; and Frederick A. de Armas, The Invisible Mistress: Aspects of Feminism and Fantasy in the Golden Age, Charlottesville, VA: Biblioteca Siglio de Oro, 1976. On Scarron, see Frederick A. de Armas, Paul Scarron, New York: Twayne, 1972. ↵
17. Without attribution, though placed in quotation marks, here Montifaud lifts an entire passage about Kongolese funerary traditions from Jacques-Paul Minge’s Encylopedie théologique, Tome 10: Dictionnaire universel de mythologie ancienne et moderne, Paris: Ateliers Catholiques, 1855, 267. Montifaud’s introductory essay to Blessebois’s classic was first published in 1877. Montifaud, xx–xxi. ↵
18. Montifaud, “Notice sur les harems noirs ou les moeurs galantes aux colonies,” xx. ↵
19. Blessebois, Le zombi du Grand-Pérou, 16. ↵
20. Ibid., 179. ↵
21. Ibid., 9. ↵
22. Sarah Juliet Lauro, The Transatlantic Zombie: Slavery, Rebellion, and the Living Dead, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2015, 35. ↵
23. Garraway, The Libertine Colony, 181. ↵
24. W. Holman Bentley, Appendix to the Dictionary and Grammar of the Kongo Language: As Spoken at San Salvador the Ancient Capital of the Old Kongo Empire, London: The Baptist Missionary Society, 1887, 794. ↵
25. Louis-Narcisse Baudry des Lozières, Second voyage à Louisiane faisant suite au premier de l’auteur de 1794 à 1798, Volume 2, Paris, 1803, 133. I’m very grateful to James Sweet for bringing this interesting text to my attention and for sharing his work on Baudry. ↵
26. James Pritchard, David Eltis, and David Richardson, “The Significance of the French Slave Trade to the Evolution of the French Atlantic World before 1760,” in David Eltis and David Richardson (eds.), Extending the Frontier: Essays on the New Transatlantic Slave Trade Database, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008, 205. ↵
27. Ibid., 215. ↵
28. Ibid., 209. ↵
29. Ibid. 220. ↵
30. Eltis, David, The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, www.slave voyages.org, last accessed May 6, 2015. ↵
31. Pritchard, Eltis, and Richardson, “The Significance of the French Slave Trade,” 222. ↵
32. Ibid., 221. ↵
33. Ibid., 221–223. ↵
34. David Geggus, “The French Slave Trade: An Overview,” William and Mary Quarterly, 58, 1, 2001, 121–122. Geggus alludes to the “old question” as to why EWE FON and GBE speakers had the greatest influence on the emergence of Vodou, “whose vocabulary are most evident in the lexicon and pantheon of Haitian Voodoo” (32). ↵
35. Philip D. Curtin, The Transatlantic Slave Trade: A Census, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1972, 81. ↵
36. I am grateful to J. Lorand Matory for explaining this linguistic nuance to me. It’s nice to have such learned friends. ↵
37. Garraway, The Libertine Colony, 180. See also Sophie Houdard, “Les Figures de l’auteur-escroc chez Paul-Alexis Blessebois dit Pierre Corneille Blessebois (1646?–1697?),” Cahiers du Centre de recherches historiques 39, 2007, 141–159. ↵
38. Garraway, The Libertine Colony, 181. Although she doesn’t entertain the possibility that zombie might derive from the French sans vie (“without life”), this additional European etymology has been suggested by Christopher Moreman and Cory Rushton, but I don’t find it terribly compelling and I doubt that Garraway would either. Christopher M. Moreman and Cory James Rushton, “Introduction: Race, Colonialism, and the Evolution of the Zombie,” in Christopher M. Moreman and Cory James Rushton (eds.), Race, Oppression and the Zombie: Essays on Cross-Cultural Appropriations of the Caribbean Tradition, Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Co., 2011, 3. The Spanish Wikipedia entry for zombies offers a chart of possible African origins of the term that includes all the possibilities listed by Garraway and adds three more, the first two from Central Africa and the third from Yoruba: nsumbi, demon; zombi, resurrected dead; and fumbi, spirit. No Kikongo dictionary that I have seen contains an entry for the word zombi, so this bit of information is dubious. Meanwhile, the entry offers that in addition to Fon, the term zan bibi is also found in the Mina language. Anonymous, “Zombi,” https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zombi, last accessed July 28, 2015. The French Wikipedia entry states in its opening sentences that the Haitian Creole word zonbi derives from the Kimbundu and Kikongo terms nzumbe and nzambé. While not offering a chart, it does list most of the possibilities indicated in the Spanish entry. Anonymous, “Zombie (mort vivants),” https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zombie_(mort-vivant), last accessed July 28, 2015. The English language entry in Wikipedia is very cursory in its etymology, basically accepting the Central African thesis. Anonymous, “Zombie,” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zombie, last accessed July 28, 2015. Add to this Max Brooks’s suggestion, in his wildly popular The Zombie Survival Guide, “that the word ‘zombie’ originally comes from the Kimbundu word ‘nzúmbe,’ a term describing a dead person’s soul.” Max Brooks, The Zombie Survival Guide: Complete Protection from the Living Dead, New York: Crown, 2003, 20. It is not clear that Brooks actually speaks Kimbundu. ↵
39. Lauro, The Transatlantic Zombie, 38. ↵
40. Garraway, The Libertine Colony, 182. ↵
41. I believe that the Central African influences on the emergence of Caribbean zombic culture are also exaggerated in the most extensive linguistic interpretation of the question yet published: Hans-W. Ackerman and Jeanine Gauthier, “The Ways and Nature of the Zombi,” Journal of American Folklore 104, 414, 1991, 466–494. While impressive and obviously carefully developed, this article is based almost entirely on secondary sources, including extensive citations of the rather dubious work of Wade Davis, and it provides the reader with no indication as to whether or not its authors were fluent in any African language or in Haitian Creole. Also, their fieldwork was limited to four interviews with paid informants. ↵
42. Anonymous, Tableau des paroisses de l’ancienne colonie de Saint-Domingue, Paris: Imprimerie de C. Farey, 1829, 4, 6. Trou Zombi remains the name of the place in Haiti today, while Boucan Zombi seems to have, at some point, been abandoned as a place name. Near Petit Goâve, meanwhile, there seems to have been a location called Roche à Zombi, but there is no indication that this was known as a place name during the colonial era. ↵
43. Antigua Gazette, November 20, 1798. Just below the announcement of Le Zombi’s arrival in Antigua, the name of the ship is spelled Le Zombyand it is called “a French republican sloop of war.” ↵
44. M. de C… “Histoire d’Okana: Fragment d’un voyage à S. Domingue,” Mercure de France, May 17, 1788. I thank James Sweet for bringing a later English translation of this article to my attention. ↵
45. Anonymous, “The History of Okan: The Fragment of a Voyage to St. Domingo,” Universal Magazine, September 1788. ↵
46. Ernest L. Abel, Death Gods: An Encyclopedia of the Rulers, Evil Spirits, and Geographies of the Dead, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2009, 94–95. ↵
47. Médéric Louis Élie Moreau de Saint-Méry, Description topographique, physique, civile, politique, et historique de la partie française de l’isle Saint-Domingue, Tome Premier, Philadelphia, 1797, 39–67. In the impressive collection of primary source documents that Moreau collected in the Caribbean while preparing to write his influential three-volume Description, the likeliest place where the word zombi might appear is in his folder titled “Poisons,” but the word does not appear there at all. Archives Nationales Section Outre Mer, Aix-en-Provence, Papiers de Moreau de Saint-Méry, F/3/88, “Empoisonnements.” ↵
48. Moreau de Saint-Méry, Description topographique. It is interesting to speculate whether or not Moreau had previously read Blessebois. He was, after all, a well-educated man and bibliophile who collected all kinds of literature and who later, during his period of exile in Philadelphia, where Description was first published, owned a bookstore. ↵
49. Melville J. Herskovits, The Myth of the Negro Past, Boston: Beacon, 1990 (1941). ↵
50. Ira P. Lowenthal, “Ritual Performance and Religious Experience: A Service for the Gods in Southern Haiti, Journal of Anthropological Research 34, 3, 1978, 396. ↵
51. Terry Rey and Karen Richman, “The Somatics of Syncretism: Tying Body and Soul in Haitian Religion,” Studies in Religion/Sciences Religieuses 39, 3, 2010, 380. ↵
52. Sydney W. Mintz and Richard Price, The Birth of African-American Culture: An Anthropological Perspective, Boston: Beacon, 1992 (1976). ↵
53. James H. Sweet, “New Perspectives on Kongo in Revolutionary Haiti,” The Americas  74, 1, 2017, 83–97. ↵
54. Baudry, Second voyage à Louisiane, 118–136. Like Moreau, Baudry also spent a period of exile in Philadelphia. ↵
55. From 1751 to 1775, West Central Africans comprised 56.4 percent of slaves who were captured and shipped to the French Caribbean, and from 1776 to 1800 they comprised 48.4 percent. Geggus, “The French Slave Trade,” 135. ↵
56. Maria Pramaggiore, “From the Living Dead to the Walking Dead: Mobility and Mobilization in Contemporary Zombie Culture,” paper presented at the Zombies: The Haitian and American Realities behind the Myth conference, Duke University, March 21, 2015. ↵

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Glossary

Aja

West African ethnic group mainly from what is today Benin and Togo. Sometimes alternatively spelled Adja. ↵

Bantu

Literally, in numerous African languages, “human people” or “the people”; a collective term for such historically and culturally connected languages and the ethnic groups that speak them. The Bantu inhabit most of Africa south of the Congo River and parts of southern West Africa to its northwest. ↵

Bight of Benin

West African region, spanning from today’s Atlantic coastal Nigeria to Ghana, that was one of the largest sources of enslaved Africans forcibly and inhumanely brought to the Americas during the transatlantic slave trade. ↵

Blessebois, Pierre-Corneille (1646–1700)

Convicted French criminal and indentured servant; author of Le zombi du Grand Pérou, published in 1697 and the first instance of the word zombie to appear in print and likely the first novel ever written in the Caribbean. ↵

de Montifaud, Marc, or Marie-Amélie Gartroule de Montifaud (1845–1912)

French author who, in her preface to the 1860 edition of Blessebois’s Le zombi du Grand Pérou, is the first on record to have ruminated over the African origins of the idea of the zombie in Blessebois’s seventeenth-century novel. ↵

Description topographique, physique, civile, politique, et historique de la partie française de l’isle Saint-Domingue

See Moreau de Saint-Méry. ↵

EGAF

Acronym for the Ewe, Gen, Aja, and Fon cluster of languages that was central to the development of Haitian Creole language, culture, and religion. ↵

Ewe Fon (Gbe)

Predominant language of the region surrounding and including the Kingdom of Hueda that was (and remains today) spoken by the Fon people and by others in related ethnic groups who are often collectively referred to as Ewe peoples. Many enslaved Africans who were brought to the French Caribbean were either fluent or conversant in this lingua franca. ↵

Fwa o tulu

Kikongo term for a sleep so deep that it resembles death. ↵

Gen

Ethnic group of West Africa, often called the Mina. ↵

Haitian Creole

The language of the Haitian people, which emerged among enslaved Africans in the eighteenth century in the French Caribbean. Though its vocabulary largely derives from French, most of its grammatical structure and tonality are African in origin, and it is not mutually intelligible with French. ↵

Kikongo

Indigenous language of the Kongo people of West Central Africa, widely spoken among Central African slaves in the French Caribbean by the mid-eighteenth century. A major Bantu language to this day in the Congo. ↵

Kingdom of Hueda (Whydah, Ouidah)

Located in today’s nation of Benin, this kingdom endured from roughly 1580 to 1728 and was heavily involved in the transatlantic slave trade. Its port city of the same name was one of the busiest points of departure for enslaved West Africans. ↵

Le zombi du Grand-Pérou ou La Comtesse de Cocagne

1697 novel written in Guadeloupe by a French indentured servant named Pierre-Corneille Blessebois, which contains the first known instance of the word zombi in print. ↵

Lingala

A lingua franca of much of Central Africa; a Bantu language that emerged after the transatlantic slave trade and is today spoken by roughly ten million people, especially in the Democratic Republic of Congo (formerly Zaire). ↵

Moreau de Saint-Méry, Médéric Louis Elie (1750–1819)

French lawyer and colonial administrator who was born in Martinique but spent much of his life in Saint-Domingue; author of the multitome Description topographique, physique, civile, et historique de la partie française de Saint-Domingue, which was first published in Philadelphia in 1797. It is the first known instance of the word zombi from what is today Haiti. ↵

Mvumbi

Kikongo for “‘inner invisible man’ or ‘soul’” (see reference in text). ↵

Ndoki

Kikongo word meaning “sorcerer” and “sorcery”. Also extant in many other Bantu languages, including Lingala. ↵

Necromancy

Magical divinatory practice that includes communication with the dead. ↵

Ngbaka

Bantu language of the Ngbaka people, who mostly live in the northwestern Democratic Republic of Congo; spoken by roughly 250,000 people. ↵

Nvumbi

An Angolan word for “body without a soul” (see reference in text). ↵

Nzambi

Kikongo for “god” or “spirit.” ↵

Ndzumbi

A Mitsogho (Gabon) word for “corpse.” ↵

“Notice sur les harems noirs ou les moeurs galantes aux colonies”

Preface to the nineteenth-century edition of Blessebois’s Le zombie du Grand Pérou, written by Marc de Montifaud.

Revenant

A ghost in French folklore; one who returns from the grave. Literally in French: “returning,” yet transformed into a noun in this instance. ↵

Taino

A Native American people who were indigenous to the Caribbean when Europeans began arriving in the late fifteenth century; the majoritarian ethnic group before then in what is today Haiti. ↵

Tumbulia

Kikongo word meaning “raising the dead.” ↵

Vonda o tulu

Kikongo word meaning “to throw into a deathlike sleep” (see text for reference). ↵

Zanbibi

Feared nocturnal spirit in West Africa. An Ewe Fon compound word for night (zan) and fearsome ghost (bibi). ↵

Zemi

Taino religious notion meaning spirit; three-cornered icons or amulets made of stone, wood, or ritual items made of bone that were believed to empower nature and watch over human believers in them. ↵

Zoba

“Stupid” in Kikongo, Lingala, and other Bantu languages.

Zonbi

Haitian Creole word that is the origin of the term “zombie” in English or “zombi” in French. Takes many forms in Haiti, like one returned from the grave or one who postmortem has part of his or her soul captured in a bottle for supernatural work. ↵

Zonbi astral

Haitian Creole word literally meaning “astral zombie”; part of a deceased person’s soul that is captured and placed in a bottle or other vessel so that its spiritual energies can be put to work by a sorcerer. ↵

Zonbi des rondes

Literally, from a combination of French and West African dialects, “ring zombies,” a nondescript form of zombie mentioned in Blessebois’s 1697 novel Le zombi du Grand Pérou.

Zonbi kò kadav

Haitian Creole word literally meaning “body dead zombie,” in reference to a human being who died and was buried but has been disinterred by a sorcerer to provide services for him or her, whether simple labor or thievery. ↵