The Origin of the Term 'Tzombi'

In response to the question about the esteemed Mr. Davis, though his work was no doubt groundbreaking, there have been a number of authorities who have called it into question on both scientific and ethical bases. I, however, am going to rely on the weight of accumulated facts to refute his claims. The origin of the term Tzombi is as follows:

In 1476 A.D. The Portuguese dispatched a ship for the north of Africa, but it was presumed lost and nothing was heard of it until several years later, when, according to Joao de Barros in his Decados da Asia it returned to Portugal in the year 1482, bearing with it people and treasures from Kongo. The sailors recounted the experience of running out of provisions, passing out from hunger, and drifting off course until they ran aground south of the Zaire river.

Since the reaction of the Kongo people to their unexpected visitors comes to us filtered through the Portuguese, it needs to be taken with a grain of salt. What we do know is that the Kongo people called the King of Portugal tzombi mbumba, which has been translated by most scholars as “lord of the earth,” presumably because of the riches he sent as gifts. What they have failed to take into account is that Kongo people were calling him this even before he sent his boatload of riches, and that the term mbumba, which refers to the terrestrial plane, is also the name of a disease which the Kongo believed was contracted through the dirt. P. Bonaventura da Corella, in his Report on Indigenous Congo Religion, relates how they threw the corpses of mbumba victims into the water. When, in the 17th century, missionaries insisted on burying them, they later found the graves dug up. It is assumed that the people dug them up and threw them in the water, but it is just as possible that the “corpses”, suffering from PMMS (Post-Mortem Mobility Syndrome), dug themselves out of their necessarily shallow graves (the water table was very high) and continued their post-deceased existences elsewhere.

Upon the return of the Portuguese in 1491 (this time bearing gifts) the mani sonyo organized a festival in which the participants, naked to the waist, painted their skins white in honor of the tzombi mbumba, or Lord of the Disease. The word tzombi eventually followed the Kongo people across the ocean, when the Portuguese slave trade carried people as far as the Caribbean, South Americas, and the U.S., from whence we find numerous anecdotes from slave owners documenting a habit of dirt-eating among their slaves, a habit which still persists in some southern states, particularly Alabama and Mississippi.

In Haiti the “zombie” became a part of Vodou, but the Haitian zombie has very little to do with the zombie we’re describing here. In fact, the Haitian zombie seems to be more performative than anything else, a vestigial ritual echoing that in 1491 which has been subsumed into the religion of Vodou.

Although there are most likely true Tzombi in the Caribbean, they have nothing to do with the tradition of Vodou. In a future entry I will attempt to trace the (sometimes enforced) migration of the Tzombi from their origins in Ancient Sumer to their current position as inhabitants of most of the world’s continents.