I’ve just started playing Resident Evil Requiem, even though it scares the blimmin’ crap out of me (I can watch horror films all day long with nary a goosebump, but put a controller in my hand and I turn into a gibbering wreck). Even if you’ve never played the games (or seen the numerous, mostly crap, movies), I’m sure you’re aware that zombies are the backbone of the Resi series. In fact, they’re the backbone of a hell of a lot of TV and film culture (Night of the Living Dead, 28 Days Later, Shaun of the Dead, The Walking Dead… the undead list goes on). But where does the word ‘zombie’ come from?
Well, turns out it’s a lot less about horror entertainment and a lot more about one of the darkest chapters of human history.
Resident Evil 0: the real origin story
Unlike 90% of my words of the week, we’re not heading back to ancient Greece this time. Although we are going back several centuries, this time we need a ticket to Central and West Africa. That’s because linguists generally trace the term ‘zombie’ back to languages in the Bantu family, which are spoken in places like modern-day Angola, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Gabon. For example:
in Kimbundu, a language spoken in Angola, the word nzumbi translates to ‘ghost’, ‘spirit’ or ‘phantom’
in Kikongo, which is spoken across Central Africa, nzambi refers to a deity, god or divine spirit
in the Mitsogho language of Gabon, the word ndzumbi literally means ‘corpse’.
So how did these terms get from Africa to the rest of the world? Tragically, it was the transatlantic slave trade that carried them across the ocean. When millions of enslaved West and Central Africans speaking Bantu languages were forcibly relocated to the French colony of Saint-Domingue (modern-day Haiti), they brought their vocabulary with them, including words like nzumbi. Under the brutal plantation system of slavery, the enslaved population, now speaking Haitian Creole (a French-based creole), redefined the meaning of nzumbi. Instead of being an invisible ghost, it became a soulless automaton raised from the dead by a sorcerer and doomed to work the fields forever. French colonisers heard this word and adapted the sound to fit their own spelling and pronunciation conventions, producing ‘zombi’.
From plantation to print
‘Zombi’s first recorded print appearance in English was in 1819 in a book by poet and historian Robert Southey called History of Brazil. Southey used the word ‘zombi’ as a title for Zumbi, the 17th-century leader of Palmares, a community of escaped enslaved people in Brazil. For the rest of the century, ‘zombis’ occasionally appeared in European and American travel writing, but as spirits, deities or magical figures – so no shambling flesh eaters with bits falling off them. And your average English-speaking Joe or Josephine in the street wouldn’t have recognised the term.
That all changed in the late 1920s with the publication of a book called The Magic Island. Written by an American called William Seabrook, it was an account of his travels in Haiti, and included a chapter devoted to the Haitian zonbi, i.e. those reanimated labourers working in sugar cane fields that I mentioned earlier. This striking imagery caught the attention of Hollywood, and the first major zombie film, White Zombie, followed in 1932. Starring Bela Lugosi, it tells the story of a Haitian plantation owner who uses Vodou magic to turn a young woman (of course it’s a young woman) into his slave.
Zombies get a taste for flesh
Soulless automatons? Tick. Penchant for munching on a nice bit of brain? Nope, not yet. We’d have to wait another 30 years for that. And if you’re any sort of horror fan, you probably already know who’s responsible – yep, George A Romero and his independent horror film, Night of the Living Dead.
Night of the Living Dead reads like a to-do list for zombies: slow-moving hordes, cravings for human flesh and the ability to zombify others by biting them. Despite that, Romero didn’t actually use the word ‘zombie’ anywhere in that film, instead referring to his filmic flesh-eaters as ‘ghouls’ or ‘living dead’. It was actually film critics, audiences and journalists who used the word to describe the creatures in the movie. By the time the 1978 sequel, Dawn of the Dead, rolled around, Romero had adopted the term himself, fully cementing the new definition of ‘zombie’ in the public consciousness.
Nowadays we also use ‘zombie’ in everyday English as a figurative term, e.g. to describe ourselves the morning after a big night out (and also the morning after that if you’re old like me). It’s even made its way into:
finance: a zombie company is a business that generates just enough cash to continue operating and pay interest on its debts, but can’t afford to grow
computing: a zombie computer is one that’s connected to the internet and has been compromised by a virus or hacker without the owner realising
grammar: a zombie noun is a verb or adjective that’s been turned into a noun, which people generally do because they think it makes them sound smarter (spoiler alert: it doesn’t)
boozing: a Zombie-with-a-capital-Z is a rum-based cocktail which tastes like fruit juice but is lethally strong. According to legend, it was invented by Donn Beach (job title: adventurer, businessman, World War II veteran and ‘founding father’ of tiki culture – he sounds amazing) to help a hungover customer get through a business meeting. Instead, the customer complained that the cocktail had turned into a zombie because it was so potent. I call that a win.
It’s clear that ‘zombie’ has come a long way – from a Central African word for spirits and corpses, to a Haitian-Creole term for stolen autonomy, to a Hollywood monster, to me being too scared by a video game to go to the toilet for three hours straight.