The Zombification of America

 Last week a headline read:

Columbia University agrees to Trump administration demands to restore funding

Among other things Columbia University agreed to empower 36 campus officers with the power to make arrests. The university also agreed to stricter controls over its Middle East studies department, which will now be overseen by a new senior vice provost who "will conduct a thorough review of the portfolio of programs in regional areas across the University, starting immediately with the Middle East" (Eye Witness News, 22 March 2025).

Similar reports from other places indicate that institutions like universities in various parts of the USA are complying with the demands of the Trump regime without protest, even if the executive demands have no legal basis. They have, in effect, decided to play it safe and be politically correct. They are like burrowing apparatchiks, submissive to those they see as having more power, and bullying those (like their students) who have less power. 

This is a sad contrast to many South African universities, which, when the National Party government sought to impose apartheid on universities that had open admission policies, staff, students and university administrations stood together in protest. They stood together for academic freedom. That was after the National Party government had been in power for 11 years. In the USA the Trump regime had been in power for barely two months when universities and others were seen to capitulate to demands for political correctness.

In South Africa it was after 11 years of National Party rule. After 21 years, or 31 years of civil repression, protest was more muted, but was still there. Some did not bow the knee to Baal, and mindlessly capitulate to unjust demands, without questioning them. 

And it is this mindlessness that is the mark of the zombie. A zombie is a corpse that is reanimated by a witch to be a servant that does the witch's bidding. Since it is a corpse, the zombie is literally brain-dead. It has no living brain so it cannot question the witch's orders. 

More recently there has been a huge uproar in the media about the leaking of a US government plan to bomb Yemen. People are going on and on about how terrible it is to talk about it, especially in the hearing of someone who is not in the inner cabal itself.  Hardly a word is said about the morality of the bombing itself, that people are actually going to die. The talk about the deed is taken more seriously, and seen as more evil than the deed itself. They strain at a gnat and swallow a camel. 

It's yet another sign of zombification, which is well expressed in the Cranberries' song Zombie. Click on the link, listen to it, and weep.

Bonking zombie is back

A few years ago I discovered that vampires were more than undead monsters that populated horror novels. There actually is a vampire sub-culture, with live human beings who enjoy drinking human blood.

But I thought zombies were safely(?) in the realm of the undead, until I read this article BONKING ZOMBIE IS BACK! Residents live in fear after gogo is found dead in house of sex . . . | DailySun blog:

Last year, sex in the house of the Veeplaas zombie led to a mother, gogo and little boy being taken to places of care.

NOW THE MUM IS DEAD AFTER NEIGHBOURS CLAIM SHE WAS BONKING HER ZOMBIE SON!

Stories about self-confessed zombie Mthandazo Klaasen (39) having sex with his 69-year-old mother spread like wildfire in Port Elizabeth’s Veeplaas kasi three weeks ago.

Does the Daily Sun know something that the rest of us don't? Even the Zombie Research Society says that:

1)The modern zombie is a relentlessly aggressive, reanimated human corpse driven by a biological infection*; 2)The zombie pandemic is coming. It’s not a matter of if, but a matter of when; 3)Enthusiastic debate about zombies is essential to the survival of the human race. (*A subset is the living zombie, defined as a relentlessly aggressive human driven by a biological infection.)

Though that footnote about the subset could possibly fit the case that the Daily Sun reports on.

Until recently most reports I've seen about zombies in the press have undoubtedly been of the undead variety, and there has been no question of "biological infection".

The reports have usually concerned people who have been accused of being witches because their neighbours allege that they have seen zombies working in their gardens. The witches, it is said, resuscitate corpses to do chores for them.

But a self-confessed zombie?

That's a new one on me? They even have a picture of him, looking, well, quite un-undead.

I wonder if any reporters of the Daily Sun have seen his death certificate. Have they been to his grave to see if his body has been exhumed? Actually I don't expect journalists from papers like the Daily Sun to research or verify their facts since their main purpose is to make money out of spreading idle gossip in print. But it would really be interesting to know something about the new zombies. And precisely what a "self-confessed" zombie is confessing.

Night of the zombie fashion models

When I saw this picture on James Higham's blog nourishing obscurity | Modern ugliness is no accident I thought it was advertising a sequel to John Wyndham's novel The Midwich cuckoos. Or perhaps a new film of a Stephen King novel about a malevolent doll animated by an evil spirit.

Instead it turned out to be more like the Night of the Zombie Fashion Models: Last day of Paris shows is good, bad and ugly - World news:

The ninth and final day of Paris' grueling ready-to-wear marathon was reminiscent of Sergio Leone's classic 1966 spaghetti western, with good, bad and downright ugly displays.

I thought that the job of fashion models was to show off the clothes and persuade people to buy them, but here one barely notices the clothes at all, and all you see is that procession of shopwindow mannequins with reanimated corpse expressions on their faces.

Zombie DNA can cause muscular dystrophy

Just when you thought it was safe to take the tin cans from under your bed legs, along comes this story. Only it isn't quite what the headline makes it seem.

Zombie DNA Can Cause Muscular Dystrophy | Vanity Fair:

Here is something new and terrifying to worry about: zombie DNA. According to The New York Times, dead “junk” genes, basically thought to be dormant and harmless, are capable of becoming reanimated somehow and causing muscular dystrophy.

We have lots of dead genes left over from the process of evolution; the Times likens them to “broken and useless junk” in an attic. But some of the genes can apparently come back from the dead and cause facioscapulohumeral muscular dystrophy, or FSHD, which causes muscles in the shoulders and face to become progressively weaker. In some people, having fewer than 10 repeated copies of one particular dead gene causes FSHD—no one with more than 10 copies of the gene gets the disease.

It's not quite things that go bump in the night, but it's bad enough.

TheoFantastique: Call for Papers: Interdisciplinary Academic Study of Zombies

One of the problems with the Mpumalanga Witchcraft Suppression Bill was that it used terms like "zombies", but failed to define them. Perhaps the legislators could benefit by sending someone to this conference: TheoFantastique: Call for Papers: Interdisciplinary Academic Study of Zombies:

The Religion and Popular Culture group on Yahoo! recently issued the following call for papers:

Call for Papers: An Interdisciplinary Collection of Essays on the Zombie

We are seeking proposals for an interdisciplinary edited volume discussing the zombie from a wide variety of perspectives and within a wide range of contexts. We encourage submissions from any discipline, including but not limited to English literature, film studies, media studies, cultural studies, gender studies, queer studies, philosophy, religious studies, anthropology, sociology, history, psychology, economics, and political science. We especially welcome new approaches to the study of zombies. In addition to theoretical essays on zombies, we also welcome critical discussions of specific zombie films, novels, and graphic novels, including those both pre- and post-Romero.

I blogged about the Witchcraft Suppression Bill soon after it was published (Notes from underground: MPUMALANGA WITCHCRAFT SUPPRESSION BILL 2007), and was glad to note that it was subsequently withdrawn (Notes from underground: Witchcraft Suppression Bill put on hold) a year later. Perhaps politicians need to realise that not every problem can be solved by legislation, and especially not by hasty legislation in which terms are not defined.

While there is indeed a problem of "witchcraft-related violence", such violence is already illegal -- there are laws against murder, arson, assault and malicious damage to property, and those who perform such acts can be prosecuted under existing laws.

In the mean time the conference may, or may not, turn up some useful information. Perhaps someone could propose a paper on the Mpumalanga Witchcraft Suppression Bill itself.

Teenage Mutant Robot Caterpillars

The Poor Mouth: Zombie caterpillars controlled by voodoo wasps:

According to the New Scientist article, the parasitoid wasp Glyptapanteles lays its eggs, about 80 at a time, in young geometrid caterpillars. The eggs hatch and the larvae feed on the caterpillar's body fluids. When they are fully developed, they eat through the caterpillar's skin, attach themselves to a nearby branch or leaf and wrap themselves up in a cocoon.


At this point, something remarkable and slightly eerie happens: the caterpillar, still alive, behaves as though controlled by the cocooned larvae. Instead of going about its usual daily business, it stands arched over the cocoons without moving away or feeding. The caterpillar stays alive until the adult wasps hatch.

Legends of the Tokoloshe

Arthur Goldstuck, the collector of South African urban legends, recently posted a couple of examples of tokoloshe stories.

Legends from a small country: Legends of the Tokoloshe #1: A monster ate my homework:

A tokoloshe is believed to have an uncanny power called 'moshoshopansi’: to make it go under. It can extend its penis to any length and send it underground into the genitals of a sleeping or unsuspecting woman… many of my informers tell me that divorce… is caused by tokoloshes raping wives of migrant labourers. When a woman loses interest in her husband, it is often interpreted as being the result of rape by the tokoloshe.

In that brief observation lurks a world of meaning. It speaks of scapegoats, refusal to face reality, inability to accept responsibility when it all goes wrong.

The tabloid press abounds in tokoloshe and similar stories, of course, and the placards for Sunday newspapers often make the the most of them. One of my favourites was Zombie ate my soap. Unfortunately I forgot to buy the paper and never saw the full story.

Traditionally the tokoloshe (Zulu utikoloshe) was a fairly harmless trickster character in folklore, who played practical jokes on people. Such characters are found in many cultures around the world. But a tokoloshe can become dangerous if caught by a witch to become a familiar. In this role the tokoloshe legend has grown in the urban areas of South Africa far more than in the rural areas, and it is therefore very properly in Arthur Goldstuck's sphere of interest as the source of numerous urban legends.

MPUMALANGA WITCHCRAFT SUPPRESSION BILL 2007

The legislature of Mpumalanga Province in South Africa has recently published a draft bill for the suppression of witchcraft (and witch hunts).

Witch hunting has been a serious problem in South Africa in recent years, though Limpopo province has probably been more affected than Mpumalanga. Phillip Pare posted the text of the draft bill in the Christianity and Society discussion forum, and I thought it might be worth posting it here too. While witch hunting has been a serious problem, I'm not sure that this is the right way of dealing with it. It is already an offence, under national legislation, to accuse someone of being a witch, and to assault anyone or damage their property, whether one has accused them of being a witch or not. The main difference this will make, if passed in the present form, would be to try to regulate traditional healers in the same way as practitioners of Western medicine are regulated. Traditional premodern society meets bureaucracy.

I have a theory that the prevalence of witchhunting is partly the encounter between premodernity and modernity in any case. The proposed bill seems to be "hair of the dog that bit you."

Sorry if the formatting looks weird. I tried to get it right, but I'm not sure if I succeeded.

MPUMALANGA WITCHCRAFT SUPPRESSION BILL 2007 (Draft)

To provide for the suppression of witchcraft in the province, to set the code of Conduct for Traditional Healers, to provide for the responsibilities of Traditional leaders and to provide for matters incidental thereto.

PREAMBLE

WHEREAS Chapter 2 of the Constitution recognizes Human rights for all.,

WHEREAS the Traditional Customs must be transformed to be in line with Constitution.

WHEREAS the Traditional Leaders must promote goodwell, Democratic Governance within their Communities.

AND WHEREAS traditional leaders must strive to enhance tradition and culture in a way that is consistent with applicable laws of the Republic of South Africa.

BE IT THEREFORE ENACTED by the Provincial Legislature of the Province of Mpumalanga, as follows:

DEFINITIONS

Definitions

"Constitution" means the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa, 1996.

"Igedla" means a person who knows and uses muti either to cure, protect from evil spirits, etc or to cause damage, suffering, harm etc. without ukuthwasa and does not foretell the future as an inyanga

"Inkosi" means a traditional leader-

(a) underwhose authority , or within whose area of jurisdiction Traditional leaders exercise authority in accordance with Customary law, and

(b) recognized as such in terms of the Traditional leadership and Governance Framework Act 2003 (Act.No. 41 of 2003).

"Inyanga" means a person who uses muti to cause harm, damage, suffering, bad luck, cure diseases, protect from evil spirits and uses mixtures shells, coins, bones,etc. to foretell the future of people, identify witches, perform spells for good and or evil purposes.

"Kuthwasa" means a special training undergone by Inyanga which teaches the inyanga about muti, ukuphengula (foretelling) and sometimes to train other new inyanga. This training can be done through disappearance under water (river/sea) for a long time or by attending the residence of the Inyanga that trains other inyangas.

"Muti" means any mixture of herbs, water, wollen cufs etc, used by wizards, igedla, inyanga, African Churches, Foreign traditional Healers, etc for the purposes of curing deseases, helping others who come to consult to them for whatever purposes and including causing harm to others or their properties.

"Province" means the Province of Mpumalanga.

"Spells" means a form of words used as magical charm or incantation used by Wizards.

"Traditional leader" means any person who, in terms of customary law of the traditional community concerned, holds a traditional leadership position, and is recognized in terms of the Traditional Leadership and Governance Framework Act, 2003.

"Umhlahlo" means a gathering of families or persons with the approval of the Traditional Leader or King at the place of an Inyanga with the purpose of identifying another as witch by the Inyanga, irrespective of whether the gathering is voluntary or involuntary "Umkhaya" has a corresponding meaning.

"Witchcraft" means the secret use of muti, zombies, spells, spirits, magic powders, water, mixtures, etc, by any person with the purpose of causing harm, damage, sickness to others or their property.

"Wizard"means any person who secretly solicit or uses muti, zombies, spells, spirits, magic powders, water, mixtures, baboons, etc. for the purposes of causing harm, damage or suffering to another.

CHAPTER 2

PROMOTION OF GOOD RELATIONS AMONGST COMMUNITY MEMBERS

2(1) No person shall point, imply or direct that any body practices witchcraft or has been bewitched by anybody.

(2) The King or Traditional Leader shall promote good neighbourhood amongst his or her subjects,

(3) The King or Traditional Leader shall in promoting good neighborhood amongst subjects, advice:

(a) any person who is of the opinion that his or rights are being violated to:

(i) report the matter to the King or Traditional leader of the offence by the other person,

(ii) Call upon all parties involved to give evidence of the nature of the allegations by the other party and the plaintiff to defend her/himself in a form of a trial,

(iii) be available on the request by the King or Traditional Leader when trying the case.

(b) If for any other reason the aggrieved party is not satisfied by the ruling of the king or Traditional Leader, he or she may:

(i) open a case with the SAPS on the alleged violation of his or her rights, or

(ii seek recourse from a Court of law of the Republic of south Africa under whose jurisdiction he or she falls.


CHAPTER 3

RESPONSIBILITIES OF TRADITIONAL LEADERS

3 It shall be the responsibility of any traditional leader to:

(1) Issue permits of practice to traditional healers who are registered with the Traditional Healers Association.

(2) keep a register of all practicing traditional Healers under his jurisdiction.

(3) Prohibit, in consultation with the Association,’ any person from practicing, who is found to be breaking the code of conduct of traditional healers or any laws applicable to the Republic of South Africa.

(4) Discourage any members of the community from obtaining permission to conduct umhlahlo.

(5) Prohibit the holding of Umhlahlo within his area of jurisdiction.

(6) Prohibit and not entertain any group of people alleging witchcraft and who request the chasing away of any person or family from the community who is alleged to be practicing witchcraft.

(7) Report to authorities, any person known to be breaking the provisions of this Bill.

CHAPTER 4

REGISTRATION OF TRADITIONAL HEALERS

4 Any person who is currently practicing or wishes to practice as a traditional healer shall:-

(1) Register with the Traditional Healers Association within his area of operation;

(2) Ensure that his or her name is kept in the register of the Traditional leader for people practicing as Traditional healers in his area of jurisdiction; and

(3) On the registration form must indicate at least tree areas of specialty of his or her practice.

CHAPTER 5

CODE OF CONDUCT OF TRADITIONAL HEALERS

5 Traditional Healers shall in abiding by the Code of Conduct:

(1) Promote the harmonious living environment for their clients.

(2) Co-operate in the open and in a manner that indicates professionalism through:-

(a) abiding by the rules and regulations of the Association;

(b) keeping a register or inventory of all medicines or muti he/she uses;

(c) clearly marking the muti and it’s purpose;(d) permitting unscheduled and scheduled searches by authorities through the Association to inspect and verify the muti so kept and any other related matters’;

(e) signing a code of conduct with the Association not to use any prohibited substances and or any human tissue as defined in the Human Tissues Act;

(f) prescribing muti for curing purposes and not for killing purposes, causing damage or harm to another nor help any person with regard to the killing, causing damage or harm others;

(g) reporting anyone soliciting human tissues or selling them; and

(h) co-operate with Police on any investigation.

(3) If the traditional healer is also an Inyanga, he or she shall not:-

(a) Point any person as a witch;

(b) Involve himself or herself in or prophesy any need for ritual killing;

(c) Provide help to anyone bringing or soliciting the use of human tissue for muti purposes; and

(d) Perform umhlahlo with the purpose of identifying any person as a witch or wizard


CHAPTER 6

OFFENCES

6 Any person who conducts himself in the manner below shall be guilty of an offence:-

1 (a) Imputes to any other person the causing, by supernatural means, of any disease in or injury or damage to any person or thing, or who names or indicates any other person as a wizard;

(b) In circumstances indicating that he professes or pretends to use any supernatural power, witchcraft, sorcery, enchantment or disappointment of any person or thing to any other person;

(c) Employs or solicits any witchdoctor, witch-finder or any other person to name or indicate any person as a wizard;

(d) Professes a knowledge of witchcraft, or the use of charms, advises any person how to bewitch, injure or damage any person or thing, or supplies any person with any pretended means of witchcraft;

(e) On the advice of any inyanga, witch-finder or other person or on the ground of any pretended knowledge of witchcraft, uses or causes to be put into operational any means or process which, in accordance with such advice or his own belief, is calculated to injure or damage any person or thing; and

(f) For gain pretends to exercise or use any supernatural powers, witchcraft, sorcery or enchantment.

SHORT TITLE AND COMMENCEMENT

9 (1) This Act is called The Mpumalanga Witchcraft suppression Act and comes into operation on a date fixed by the Premier by proclamation in the Provincial Gazette

Harry Potter fans might be riled by the definition of "wizard". I think Kim Paffenroth and others might be interested in the reference to zombies (though zombies are not defined).

The Bill also refers to African Churches, and since the Orthodox Patriarchate of Alexandria and All Africa is the original African Church, having been established by St Mark the Evangelist in AD 42, I wonder if the oil used in Holy Unction counts as "muti", and would have to be registered in terms of the Act if it becomes law in its present form?