For those of you who don't know, in variants of Kongo cosmology, Nzambi-Mpungu can be conceived of as the "High God;" more specifically, he reigns over both Ntoto, the mountain of the living, and Mpemba, or Kalunga, the world of the dead beneath the water, which is chalk white, like the kaolin at the bottom of the river. A special category of the dead, very close to Nzambi Mpungu, consists of "Nzambi creatures," chalk-white beings. "Zombies" are the stuff of American hysteric...al legend, originally brought to these shores and immortalized in ethnocentric fiction by soldiers returning from the US occupation of Haiti in the early twentieth century, just as was "Voodoo." In Haitian Vodou, people believe in "Zombi," but they are not at all the stuff of ludicrous and endlessly repeated American B-movies. Though many and varied, some Zombi are purgatorial anti-social persons, who have been condemned, captured, and taken "to the north" to labor eternally as slaves--the greatest fear that a Haitian can have, given the torturous history of the island. Therefore, contrary to popular conception, the Zombi does not come after you; a priest charged with carrying out the "sentence" comes after the anti-social person, adjudged as such by local secret societies. (Please correct any errors you see here, my knowledgeable friends.)
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