THE PLANET NERD SOCIETY

VOODOO

The shuffling group of nine farm laborers who presented themselves for work in the field of the plantations of HASCO, the Haitian-American Sugar Corporation, was a sorry sight. They wore ragged clothes, worse than the tattered clothing of most other poor Haitian peasants, and they stood around in sullen silence while orders for gathering in the crops were issued to all the other labour gangs. But that year, 1918, there was a record harvest of sugar cane in the Caribbean republic of Haiti, and the HASCO manager needed all the hands he could find to work in the plantation.

The manager listened patiently to the explanation of the village headman Ti Joseph and his wife Constance,  who told him the laborers were form a remote part of the mountain area near Haiti’s border with the Dominican Republic, and they were shy and nervous because they only spoke their own obscure dialect. The men couldn’t understand French or the local Creole language, said Joseph, but if they were kept away from other workers, as a group on their own, they would prove to be tireless and efficient labourers.

Ti Joseph, like most other contract labour negotiators, agreed a rate of pay, to be handed over to him and shared his team of laborers. The HASCO foreman agreed to give this morose group of villagers an opportunity to prove they were worth their wages. By the end of the day Ti Joseph’s group had harvested the quota of sugar cane, stopping only at sunset for a simple meal of unsalted millet porridge. For the rest of the week, the gang of laborers worked uncomplainingly in the sweltering heat and humidity, toiling in the fields, having only one plain meal in the evening, and earning valuable bonuses for their village headman.

On Sunday they rested as worked stopped for the day, and the headman left them in the care of his wife, while he travelled to the capital of Port au Princeto spend some of the money he had made from the sweat of the laborers. His wife Constance took pity on the harvesters and escorted them to a local village for a small break from their toils, watching the spectacles of a church festival. But the workers stood around awkwardly and silently, showing no signs of joining the festivity. Finally, Constance bought them all a treat, a packet of sweet biscuits made of brown sugar and salted nuts. The effect on the workers was dramatic. Chewing on the salted biscuits, they began to cry and wail. Then they staggered off into the mountain and headed back towards their village.

There they were greeted by relatives and friends who reeled back in horror. The sugar plantation labour gang was local men who had been buried in the village graveyard over the past few months. They were in facts, zombies!

The tale of the zombie workers was published by American writer and explorer William Seabrook who settled in Haiti in the 1920’s. His amazing report served only to confirm other ghastly tales of the gruesome occult practices on Haiti, the birth place of the voodoo black magic cult and the graveyard of the zombies, the living dead. The mysterious practice of voodoo, which had, ironically, helped the black slaves of Haiti win their independence, turned against them to become a haunting oppression. And the zombie warriors, who fought tirelessly to defeat their colonial masters, had become pathetic ghouls trapped in the twilight world between life and death.

Until 1844, the territory of Haiti had occupied the entire mountainous mass of the sprawling island of Hispaniola, the first landing place of Christopher Columbus in his pioneering voyage of discovery to the New World. Originally inhabited by Arawak and then Carib Indians, the history of Hispaniola was first written in blood when the new European explorers embarked on a campaign of slaughter and massacre for the first 50 years after the arrival of Columbus. Hispaniola became a Spanish colony, and almost a dessert island, after the extermination of the Indians, until it was repopulated by African slaves shipped from across the Atlantic. The unfortunate Africans, wrenched from their homes to work as slave laborers in the fields, brought with them only a few relics of their own culture. But they also brought an unquenchable belief in the African rituals of magic and the occult, which was to grow to become Haiti’s own voodoo religion.

In the power struggles which followed, the island of Haiti was eventually ceded to the French, who built up their own repressive, but thriving, economy based on African slave labour and the crops of sugar, coffee and cotton. By the time of French Revolution in 1789, there were 40,000 Frenchmen in Haiti, controlling a middle class 30,000 mulattos of mixed race, and more than half a million slaves living in bondage and poverty. The new Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte had high hopes of using Haiti as a launching pad for a great naval fleet to recapture France’s lost territories in North America. But for the black slaves, who had caught a glimpse of the freedom the French had won for themselves in the overthrow of their own royal masters back in France; their goal was independence from France.

In their bid to break free from oppression, the slaves were led by a mysterious priest and witch doctor, Boukman, who initiated rebellious slaves into voodoo rituals in the deep forests and sent them into battles against the French. Inspired by voodoo rituals and ‘magic potions’ which robbed them of the fear of pain or death, the black ‘zombie’ warriors staged a series of uprisings, in which they repaid the brutality of their French rulers with even more appalling savagery of their own. Eventually, under the leadership of General Toussaint l’ Ouverture, they triumphed and declared an independent republic, although General l’ Ouverture himself was to die in exile and captivity in France.

The new republic struggled into the 20^th century, still beset by civil war and instability, with intervention by the French and the British until finally, from 1915 to 1934; it came under rule by United States. During the 1940s and 1950s there were a series of coups d’ etat until a wily physician, Dr Francois Duvalier, seized power in 1957.

For Duvalier, known throughout Haiti as ‘Papa Doc’, the ancient religion of voodoo provided a powerful tool for unifying the people of Haiti in the belief that they all shared a unique, cultural bond unknown anywhere else in the world. When his rule degenerated into a cruel dictatorship in 1964, and he declared himself President for Life, voodoo and the mysterious myth of the zombie were enlisted as weapon s to cow his people into a life of ignorance and superstition.

Duvalier gave himself the trappings of high priest of voodoo and surrounded himself with a band of secret policeman, the Tonton Macoutes, meaning bogeyman ‘. The Tonton Macoutes reveled in their fearsome image as part state police and part witch doctors. Papa Doc encouraged voodoo worship, and terrifying tales were spread of the demonic powers of him and his henchmen, saying that anyone who opposed them would be turned into mindless zombies.

Soon the life of the country was completely governed by voodoo and black magic.  Haitian peasants concoted bizarre rituals to prevent their dead loved once from being raised from the grave as zombies. They insisted that their own families should take the same precautions for them on their death to ensure that they were not resurrected as living dead. The terror of villagers was heightened by documented examples of dead relatives, discovered years after their burial, alive but mentally deranged. Even the poorest peasants borrowed money to buy heavy ornate stones to place over the graves of dead relatives, in order to prevent voodoo doctors from digging them up and regenerating them as living ghost. Bereaved families would take it in turns to watch over fresh graves for several weeks, until they were sure that the body inside was sufficiently decomposed as to be useless to voodoo witch doctors. In other cases, corpse were injected with deadly poisons, mutilated with knives and axes, and riddled with bullets to make sure that they stayed dead.

These gruesome practices were actively promoted and encouraged by Duvalier, who needed a pervading atmosphere of fear and witchcraft to keep his grip on the population. But it soon provoked of disgust from abroad. In 1962, President Kennedy threatened to cut off any more foreign aid from the US to Haiti unless Duvalier introduced democratic measures. Papa Doc reacted angrily by declaring he had put a voodoo curse on the President. In fact when President Kennedy was assassinated the following year, Duvalier claimed perverted ‘credit’ for his death and reinforced his power over the power of the people of Haiti still further.

But even witch doctors that practice voodoo are not immortal. In 1971, Francois Duvalier died and his nervous people waited several weeks to make sure he would not rise again as a zombie. Then his son Jean-Claude, just 19 years old, was installed as President and immediately nicknamed ‘Baby Doc Duvalier.

In the meantime, another American President had grown impatient with the cruel injustices of Haitian dictatorship. President Jimmy Carter, ignoring the voodoo curse which apparently laid on Kennedy, announced that he, too, would retract aid to Haiti if the Duvalier family did not make moves towards granting Haitians basic human rights. In February 1978 Carter himself became the subject of a voodoo curse. The widow of Papa Doc, ‘Mama Doc’ Duvalier, summoned the Tonton  Macoutes and a voodoo priest to a gory ritual in the capital, Port au Prince, where a pit was dug and a live bull was buried, together with a portrait of a President Carter. The following year Iranian fanatics stormed the US Embassy in Tehran, and when President Carter mounted a rescue effort, US Special Forces were bogged down in sudden sandstorms in the Iranian dessert and many died in collisions involving aircraft. Carter was defeated in his attempt to win another term in the White House and left the office a bitter and broken man.

Only two years later, a Harvard scientist, Dr E Wade Davis, who had managed to penetrate the veil of secrecy surrounding the voodoo practices in Haiti, announced: zombie-ism actually exists. There are Haitians who have been raised from their graves and returned to life.’

Dr Davis had been recruited specially to study zombies by Dr Lamarque Douyon, the Canadian-trained head of the Port au Prince Psychiatric Center. The two doctors carried out physical and mental examinations of ‘recovered zombies’ Clairvius  Narcisse, who was declared dead at the Albert Schweizer Hospital in Port au Prince in 1962 but who reappeared alive in his home village two years later.

Narcisse was able to point to the scar on his cheek made by one of the nails driven into his coffin, and had astonished villagers by leading them to his own grave and digging it up to show them empty coffin. According to Narcisse, he was ‘killed’ by his brothers for refusing to go along with their plan to sell off part of their family land. He could not recall how long he had been buried, but he was eventually unearthed by a witch doctor who cast a spell on him, which brought him back to life.

Another zombie studied by the doctors, a woman named Ti Femme, had been poisoned by her parents for refusing to marry the husband they had been chosen for her for bearing another man’s child.

Dr Davis decided that both Narcisse and Ti Femme had been victims of a rare form of suspended animation, induced by the poison of a voodoo priest. The poison, he explained, is not a fatal if administered in precisely the correct dose, but it can give all convincing symptoms of death. He reported: ‘Zombies are a Haitian phenomenon which can be explained logically. The active ingredients in the poison are extracts from the skin of the toad Bufo marinus and one more species of puffer fish. The skin of the toad is a natural chemical factory which produces hallucinogens, powerful anesthetics and chemical that affects the heart and nervous system. The puffer fish contains a deadly nerve poison called tetrodotoxin.’

Dr Davis had compared the clinical reports of Haitian zombies with cases in Japan where people had suffered acute poisoning as a result of eating puffer fish from which the tetrodotoxin had not been completely removed. The Japanese case histories, he found,’…read like classic accounts of Haitian zombification’. In at least two cases Japanese victims had been declared dead, but had recovered before their funerals were held.

A witch doctor in Haiti is very skilled in administering just the right dose of poison,’ Dr David explained. Too much poison will kill the victim completely and resuscitation will not be possible. Too little and the victim will not be a convincing corpse.’ 

With the mystery of voodoo and zombies apparently solved, Baby Doc Duvalier’s power over the people of Haiti dissolved virtually overnight. In 1986, he fled from his palace at Port au prince to political asylum in France. Just to make sure that the junior dictator never returns to Haiti, a committee of witch doctors met in the capital and declared a curse on him. Regardless of the scientific evidence of Dr Davis, the witch doctors have warned that if Baby Doc sets foot in Haiti again, he will be turned into a zombie.

The curse seems to have worked so far.