I am currently taking a class about women and religion in Africa, and am reading about witchcraft as part of a research project. I came across this story that included a zombie and wanted to share it with you. This comes from a 2002 book by Misty Bastian.
"There is a story going around Lagos that Illustrates the lethal cocktail produced when Ignorance and superstition are combined with poverty. It begins with the driver of a motorcycle taxi, called an Okada, who picked up a female passenger one day and handed her a helmet. The helmet is the first clue that this is not your usual Okada story. No one in Lagos, Nigeria's largest city, wears a helmet while riding a motorcycle.
The passenger didn't put on the helmet; she wanted to protect her hairstyle. She placed the helmet on the head of the driver instead. No sooner had she done this than he vanished and the motorcycle crashed.
Drivers swarmed around. Someone recognized the driver's bike, but his body was nowhere to be found. A group went to his house to break the news to his family.
There, they found the driver, stretched out on his bed, in a zombie- like state. And from the mouth of this zombie came money, more money than any of them had ever seen before."
In this story, the zombie represents the futility some men feel about gaining access to and controlling the sexuality of young women in the cities. The Okada taxi driver is a stock villain of modern Nigerian magic, he is a money magician, preying on the unwary and their need for cheap, rapid transport through Lagos streets, disguised as an honest, even humble entrepreneur. The promise of speed and efficiency, elusive commodities in the land of the traffic jams (known as 'go-slows'), is a ruse to lure young women under the medicated helmet. "Medicine" is one of the primary methods of using witchcraft against fellow humans. With their powerful heads imprisoned and vision obscured, the women disappear off the liminal space of the road and reappear suggestively, without consciousness or volition, on the magician's bed-where their valuable (and already commodified?) bodies produce the cash that a motorcycle taxi driver would otherwise never earn.
What is new about this story is that the young woman inadvertently foils her mystical assailant through her vanity. She appears the perfect victim; she is young, beautiful and alone on the Lagos streets. She is more aware of her costume and personal grooming than of the potential danger of her surroundings. But it is this self-absorption that saves her: rather than giver herself hat hair after all the time and money that has gone into her hair style, the young woman impatiently puts the helmet on the driver's head, sending him to the fate he had reserved for her. The money magician does not control her body; she controls his.
You make a lot of interesting points in this post. One particular passage caught my eye, "She is more aware of her costume and personal grooming than of the potential danger of her surroundings." It seems almost ironic that her self-absorption results in the money magician's plan backfiring. It reminds me of the irony depicted in Warm Bodies when "R" is exploring the city to discover its occupants still completely absorbed in their phones/iPods.
ReplyDeleteIt also sheds some light on the question I posed on the "Zombies Taking Over Bollywood" post regarding zombie culture beyond that of the US. It seems there is some evidence of zombies in the cultural roots of Nigeria as well.
What stuck out to me about this post is the concept we've been tossing about concerning control, Delice style. The magician attempts to control his victim, but becomes the victim himself. That the tables are turned is interesting, as any twist in a story is, but something about the story itself...Control, what is it about the human psyche that thirsts so much for control. We want it more than anything else. We want money because it gives us control, over our needs (we don't have to worry about food or shelter), control over each other (you want it, you got it, New Friend/long-lost family member, in the case of winning the lottery), control over the elements (I won't worry about freezing to death, or roasting in summer heat). With the introduction of a zombie threat, and specifically a zombie apocalypse, the need for control is made salient. What have we been talking about this whole semester, what does every comic, or show, or book, depict as the crises? Our loss of control, over our situation, over each other, all the normal rules that we use to control our lives, and be controlled by those in power, are shifted by this new event.
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