Authors: Nicholas Wolff
He
senses
he is among the dead, but he cannot break free. He wanders back and forth across the line of consciousness and individual action, until the master reasserts control. That was the second thing I took from Africa.
The rest was taught to me by a man named Tshompa, a Guinean healer in his forties who I’d been told by reliable contacts was a sorcerer. I met him one day in 2001 in Conakry. I had sent word through an intermediary that I wanted to talk about
nzombes
. After many false starts and refusals on Tshompa’s part, I offered to bring him a bottle of his favorite whiskey: Johnnie Walker Green Label, which was practically unobtainable in Guinea at that time.
When he first walked into the house where I was meeting him—a shack off the main road in Conakry roofed with sheets of tin—I immediately felt a presence. The air seemed to hum, as if I were standing beneath one of those huge overhead power lines. Brimming with something powerful.
He appeared younger than I’d expected. Small eyeballs behind thick eyelids, a sloping forehead, balding with tufts of hair cut close to the scalp. Wide mouth, lined all around with a small gutter, an indentation, which gave every movement of his mouth, every expression, a subtle power.
I will recount here from my notes the essence of that conversation.
“Tell me about the
nzombes
,” I began. He’d looked at me with contempt. I took the bottle of Johnnie Walker out of my bag and offered it to him.
“What do you want to know?” he’d said with mocking courtesy in his surprisingly good English.
“Everything.”
He’d snorted with laughter as he held the bottle in his hands.
“I’ve read something about your zombies,” he said, his eyes blooming and his lips opening wide as he pronounced
zom-beez
, in cartoonish disgust. Then he made the African sound of dismissal inside his mouth.
Tssssshhh.
“What was wrong about what you read?”
“Everything!” he roared. He twisted the cap on the Johnnie Walker, took a dirty glass, and poured some whiskey into it. As he drank, his eyes studied me. “This at least you can do right, you
murungu.
Making whiskey. Ha-ha.”
“Tell me about
nzombes
.”
“In this book I read, a
murungu
book, it said the sorcerer creates the
nzombe
to work for him. To plow the fields, to plant his beets! Is this true?”
I nodded. “I’ve read those books, too.”
Tshompa laughed sourly. “To work in his fields! Is that all an African can do? I can get a worker in Kasama for one dollar a day. One dollar! You think a sorcerer would exert himself for that price?
Tsssshhh.
You think even our great men are nothing more than animals.”
“I’m not sure what you read, but that isn’t all—”
“You are another slanderer. Perhaps I will show you what being a
nzombe
is, ha? Just a touch?”
“I came here for information, not to be insulted.”
“You can learn nothing,” he said dismissively.
“Perhaps there’s nothing to know.”
“What?!” the man said, angrily.
“You talk about everything the sorcerer doesn’t do, but nothing he does. Perhaps you don’t know. I can’t tell you how many
pishers
I’ve met. Have I wasted good whiskey on you?”
“Ah?” he said, turning his head as if he were hard of hearing. “What is this
pisher
?”
“Charlatan. Faker.”
The eyes now. And I felt as if the darkness behind him moved, as if shapes had been rearranged there.
“You insult me? Why do you ask about the
nzombe
?”
“Because I want to know.”
“You are not worthy of this knowledge.”
“Because I am
murungu
?”
He made a face. “You think only Africans can make a
nzombe
? Only the Haitians? We are the only ones who will admit to it.”
“
Murungu
can make a
nzombe
?”
“Oh, yes. But he will do it his way. In secret.”
“Tell me why you make your
nzombes,
if not to work for you.”
“This”—I didn’t catch the word the first time, but I wrote out
pam-way
in my notebook blindly, in the darkness—“is not possible to explain.”
“What did you call it?”
“This
pamwe.
This . . . binding.”
“Tell me.”
“The
nzombe,
how can I tell you? It is the most difficult thing in the world. This is the first thing no one understands, not even these chickens—” He gestured outside, meaning the passersby, the poor peasants dressed in greasy, torn clothes. “Listen,
murungu.
Sorcery is a world bigger than this world. And sorcerers seek out the
nzombe
because it is the final thing in their world. The pinnacle, yes? A test of who is a master. You understand? They do this not because it is easy. Only because it is difficult.”
He was staring at the ground.
“I will talk so you can understand. You Westerners, you love your houses. I’ve seen the pictures, eh, these enormous houses with the cars parked in front. So the human, you can say she is a house. A dark house you come to at night across a broad field, no stars shining. You can feel its size in the night. A great human, a . . . a . . . a significant person, is a big house. A mansion! And when you come close, the lights lit up for holidays. Like the British used to have here, you understand, for their Christmas parties? This could be the soul of the poorest man in the village. When the sorcerer approaches his soul, he sees the dimensions. And the richest man—” Tshompa spit. “He could be a hut, a simple dwelling. Unworthy of the sorcerer. He will pass him by.” Laughter, sinister in the gloom.
“Unless he has use for him.”
“Perhaps.” Tshompa stared at the ground and hugged his arms to his chest. “The second thing you must understand is that a door must be left open. Why does the sorcerer sometimes strike at the moment of death? Because it is then the door has been left open! Why do the gullible fall? Because their defenses are weak. He needs this, because the work of entering another soul is not easy. So! Say a man is sick, getting close to his death. Well, then, a small door opens. Juuuuust a crack. The sorcerer slips in. He doesn’t want a dead man—a sorcerer already knows death, he practices death! It’s
life
he wants. Entrance, entrance into another’s life. To bind with another soul in order to have that soul and walk in new worlds.
Pamwe.
The binding. This is what gives him new life.”
He stopped for a moment, considering what he’d said. “But sometimes in life, this door is left open. You understand?”
“How?”
“Ah. Sometimes the person wants it, wants to become a
nzombe.
You don’t believe, I see, but it’s true. Maybe they are curious about the other side of the world, or maybe the sorcerer whispers a story in their ear, tells them the things that will come to them if they allow the binding.”
“So a living person can become a
nzombe
?”
“Of course! But someone who already has this open window. Perhaps it is in their past, an ancestor who played with the sorcerers, no? Or there is a wish to come over to the other side, and then they are trapped.”
“By ‘the other side,’ ” I said, “you mean death?”
“Death and everything beyond death.”
I took a minute to take that in, but Tshompa barely noticed.
“They are curious!” he said with a guttural laugh. “They want to know! And, how do you say, curiosity, it killed the cat.”
He paused. I saw the bottle of whiskey twist and lift, the green-and-gold Johnnie Walker label flashing in the semidarkness, and heard the tink of bottleneck on glass edge. He slurped.
Tshompa held the glass in his right hand, his left arm across his chest, held tight. He looked down at the ground, contemplating.
“So! The sorcerer goes inside. He is like a . . . What do you call it?”
“A thief.”
“No!”
“A trespasser.”
“Yes. Okay. And it is something I can’t really describe to you. Poor
murungu,
your English does not have the words I need.”
“Try, Tshompa. And before you finish my bottle.”
“Ha. Mean woman.”
Tshompa stared at me.
“You bind with another soul,” I prompted.
“Yesssss. You can smell what her mother cooked for her when she was a baby, you can smell it in your own nostrils, do you understand? Memories she cannot have anymore, memories she has forgotten for years. You walk and you walk and you hear and see everything. The evil things in her heart, the evil things she has done, the deaths she wishes on those around her, like black powder smoke curling up, enough to choke you. And any one of these things, you can make her remember, you can make real to her again. Imagine a house with two million rooms. Some sorcerers have become lost in their own
nzombes
! They are trapped in their own bindings. Do you understand? It is dangerous. It is travel to another world. And what you can set in motion in this world!”
“So you don’t control the
nzombe
? You aren’t pulling the levers.”
Another snort. “
Murungu,
you are so crude. You think this because you believe Africans are beasts. We walk around with our mouths open like AAAAHHHHH.” He stood, his arms in front of him, his mouth open and his head tilted to the side. “AHHHHH!” he cried, louder. Then he gave me a sharp look and sat back in his chair. “A poor sorcerer has only a little control. It’s like a young boy getting into his father’s car and touching the gas pedal and—” Tshompa shot back in his chair, his arms coming up to shield his eyes. “It wants to go. And it goes. But you have pointed the way. You have found the evil thing that will make the
nzombe
yours. But a great sorcerer? Ahhhh. This . . .” He wagged his finger, head twisting toward the ground. “This is something.”
“You’re saying a great man can control the
nzombe
completely?”
He looked at me disapprovingly. “What is ‘completely’? Even the great men are still men, huh? So the host may escape the sorceror’s mind for a moment or two and come back to himself. But the sorcerer will capture him again.”
“And what happens when the
nzombe
dies? Does the sorcerer die, too?”