B’ys. What was on the go in colonial times? European nations were fighting over which sovereign got to own lands all around the globe. Lands which were already clearly occupied by people but still acquired for the glory - or perhaps more precisely for the coffers - of this crown or that. The sun never set on the British Empire, am I right? Look at our own island of Newfoundland – here was Britain’s first colony and through the jigs and the reels over a few hundred years even our own parents were not technically born in Canada but rather in Newfoundland, a not-really-independent semi-colony of the fast-fading British Empire that was governed by a Royal Commission of officials appointed by His Royal Majesty’s government. But the British weren’t the only baddies. The French were equally imperialistic despite their loud and involved support of American independence (I’m looking at you, Lafayette. Yes, I’ve seen Hamilton). While they were gifting the Americans the Statue of Liberty and singing about guns and ships, they also held these beliefs to be self-evident but only for white land-owning men. Their support for American independence probably had everything to do with their historic rivalry with Britain and far less to do with the pursuit of liberty. Case in point: Haiti. The French colonized the western side of the island now known as Hispaniola in the early 1600s because of its rich sugar and coffee and to work these plantations they accumulated tons of slaves from West Africa. These people came from cultures that were both similar and conversely disparate but they had one incredibly unfortunate circumstance in common – they were all people struggling to remain people in the unfathomable institution of slavery. Guess what? You cannot keep a peoples’ spirit down and in the case on Haiti, the slave population rose up and in 1804 defeated their French oppressors and declared their independence becoming the only slave population to do so in all of history. In the 200 hundred years of a slavery though, a distinct Haitian culture emerged borrowing from various West African cultures and one of the most recognizable parts of this culture is what we call Voodoo or Voodun. When we think of Voodoo we think of the voodoo doll (not a real thing), possession, sacrifice and all manner of strange practices at least from the Western eye’s perspective. But above all of this is the idea of the zombie. In voodoo, the zombie is a person whose free will has been removed. Whose soul belongs to someone else and who can do nothing but what its master commands. Is it really that strange that fear of becoming a zombie is a method of social control given the history of slavery in Haiti? But this is more than a fairy story told to keep you off a forest path at night. Scientists have tried to find the source of the alleged zombie powder that can give the appearance of death with the absence of pain for medical reasons and in the story of at least one Haitian man, they may have done so. But there is more than just the science of slowing a person’s vitals. There is the magic of the soul, the magic of the voodoo teachings. There is an art to creating the zombie and the whole thing is some weird.
Warning: some language or themes may not be suitable for all ages.
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