by Wade Davis
The air was musty, the usual reassuring scent. From behind the oak cabinet that held the ancient folios and the original editions of Linnaeus, I extracted some leather-bound monographs, seeking impatiently that first clue that might solidify my intuitions. I found it in an old brown-paged catalog written some forty years ago. Datura did grow in Haiti, three species, all of them introduced from the Old World. I scanned the list of common names, names that frequently reflect popular applications of the plant. One of the species was Datura stramonium. To the Haitians this was concombre zombi— the zombi’s cucumber! With a quiet sense of satisfaction I retreated to my favorite chair, and within minutes fell fast asleep.
•
A key touched the outer lock. Professor Schultes walked in, his arm cradling several volumes.
“Don’t you usually sleep in your office?” he asked wryly. We exchanged pleasantries, and then I briefed him on the zombi investigation.
Schultes shared my instincts for datura, and together we spent the morning building the case.
There was no question that species of datura are topically active. Sorcerers among the Yaqui Indians of northern Mexico anoint their genitals, legs, and feet with a salve based on crushed datura leaves and thus experience the sensation of flight. Schultes felt that quite possibly the Yaqui had acquired this practice from the Spaniards, for throughout medieval Europe witches commonly rubbed their bodies with hallucinogenic ointments made from belladonna, mandrake, and henbane, all relatives of datura. In fact, much of the behavior associated with the witches is as readily attributable to these drugs as to any spiritual communion with the diabolic. A particularly efficient means of self-administering the drug for women is through the moist tissues of the vagina; the witch’s broomstick or staff was considered a most effective applicator. (Our own popular image of the haggard woman on a broomstick comes from the medieval belief that witches rode their staffs each midnight to the sabbat, the orgiastic assembly of demons and sorcerers. In fact, it now appears that their journey was not through space, but across the hallucinatory landscape of their minds.)
That the plant is capable of inducing stupor is suggested in the origins of the name itself, which is derived from the dhatureas, bands of thieves in ancient India that used it to drug their intended victims. In the sixteenth century the Portuguese explorer Christoval Acosta found that Hindu prostitutes were so adept at using the seeds of the plant that they gave it in doses corresponding to the number of hours they wished their poor victims to remain unconscious. A later traveler to the Indies, Johann Albert de Mandelslo, noted in the mid-seventeenth century that the women, closely watched by their husbands yet tormented by their passion for the novel Europeans, drugged their mates with datura and then “prosecuted their delights, even in the presence of their husbands,” who sat utterly stupefied with their eyes wide open. A more macabre use was recorded from the New World, where the Chibcha Indians of highland Colombia administered a close relative of datura to the wives and slaves of dead kings, before burying them alive with their deceased masters.
The pharmacological evidence was solid. Datura was topically active, and in relatively modest dosage induced maddening hallucinations and delusions, followed by confusion, disorientation, and amnesia. Excessive doses resulted in stupor and death.
Yet I had another intuitive reason to implicate datura in the zombi phenomenon. Among many Amerindian groups, life is conceptually divided into stages beginning with birth and progressing through initiation, marriage, and finally death. The transition from one stage to the next is often marked by important ritualistic activity. When I had first heard Kline and Lehman describe Narcisse’s account of his resurrection from the grave, it had struck me as a kind of passage rite—a perverse inversion of the natural process of life and death. Perhaps more than any other drug, datura is associated with such transitional moments of passage, of initiation and death. The Luisena Indians of southern California, for example, felt that all youths had to undergo datura narcosis during their puberty rites in order to become men. The Algonquin and other tribes of northeastern North America also employed datura, calling it wysoccan. At puberty, adolescent males were confined in special longhouses and for two or three weeks ate nothing but the drug. During the course of their extended intoxication, the youths forgot what it was to be a boy and learned what it meant to be a man. In South America the Jivaro, or Shuar—the famed headhunters of eastern Ecuador—give a potion called maikua to young boys when at the age of six they must seek their souls. If the boy is fortunate, his soul will appear to him in the form of a large pair of creatures, often animals such as jaguars or anacondas. Later the soul will enter the body.
For many Indian tribes datura is closely associated with death. In parts of highland Peru it is called huaca, the Quechua name for grave, because of the belief that those intoxicated with the plant are able to divine the location of the tombs of their ancestors. The Zuni of the American Southwest chew datura during rain ceremonies, often placing the powdered roots in their eyes as they beseech the spirits of the dead to intercede with the gods for rain. Perhaps more than any other clue, it was this connection between datura and the forces of death and darkness that had offered the first indication of the makeup of the zombi poison.
Our attention naturally focused on Datura stramonium, the species known in Haiti as the zombi’s cucumber. Although this plant appears to have been native to Asia, its value as a drug was such that it was widely dispersed throughout Europe and Africa long before the time of Columbus. Because Schultes knew of no reports of the indigenous use of this species by Caribbean Indians, and because of the African origins of the Haitian, I was particularly curious about its distribution in West Africa.
Later that day, it came as no surprise to read that many tribes made use of Datura stramonium. The Hausas of Nigeria used the seeds to heighten the intoxication of ritual beverages. It was given to Fulani youths to excite them in the sharo contest, the ordeal of manhood. Witch doctors in Togo administered a drink of its leaves and the root of a potent fish poison (Lonchocarpus capassa) to disputants who appeared before them for a settlement. In many parts of West Africa the use of Datura stramonium in criminal poisonings still takes a unique form: women breed beetles and feed them on a species of the plant, and in turn use the feces to kill unfaithful lovers.
If the poison originated in Africa, it was reasonable to assume that the antidote that Kline had referred to would be found there as well. It was therefore with some satisfaction that I discovered that the recognized medical antidote for datura poisoning is derived from a West African plant. The substance is physostigmine, a drug first isolated from the Calabar bean (Physostigmine venenosum), a climbing liana that grows in swampy coastal areas of West Africa from Sierra Leone south and east as far as the Cameroons. It is especially well known on the Calabar coast near the Gulf of Guinea at the mouth of the Niger River, precisely the region from which many of the forefathers of the Haitian people embarked as slaves for the plantations of the New World.
A brief sojourn in the ethnographic literature revealed that the eighteenth-century French plantation owners of Saint Domingue, now Haiti, chose their slaves with some care. The carnage on the plantations was horrendous, and as they found it cheaper to bring in adult Africans than to raise slaves from birth, prodigious numbers had to be imported. In a mere twelve years, for example, between 1779 and 1790, the slave ships that plied the coast of Africa from Sierra Leone to Mozambique unloaded close to four hundred thousand slaves in Saint Domingue. Although these unfortunate individuals came from virtually every corner of the continent, the plantation owners clearly had certain preferences. The Senegalese were highly regarded for their superior morality and taciturn character—an ironic assessment for the slavers to make—whereas the people from Sierra Leone and the Ivory and Gold Coasts were considered a stubborn group likely to revolt and desert. The Ibos of the southern Slave Coast of what is now Nigeria worked well but were prone to suicide. The people from th
e Congo and Angola were highly regarded, and large numbers of them were imported. But it was the peoples bought along the Slave Coast that were preferred above all others, and much of the European slave trade concentrated there. Such was the scale of the trade that in the Kingdom of Dahomey it became a national industry, with the economy of the entire country based on annual expeditions against neighboring peoples. Many of the captured victims—Nagos, Mahis, and Aradas of the western Yoruba, among others—were taken down the Niger, and there they fell into the hands of a notorious and opportunistic tribe of traders, the Efik of Old Calabar.
Originally fishermen, the Efik were ideally situated near the estuary of the Niger River to take advantage of the bitter competition for slaves. The prevailing winds and currents forced all ships returning to Europe or the Americas from the Ivory and Gold Coasts to pass eastward toward the Slave Coast and close to the shores of Efik lands. As avaricious middlemen soon equipped with European arms, the Efik came to control the entire trade with the hinterland; their name, in fact, is derived from an Ibibio-Efik word meaning “oppress,” a name received from those neighboring tribes on the lower Calabar and Cross rivers whom the Efik prevented from establishing direct contact with the white traders.
The Efik were no more cooperative with the Europeans. They demanded lines of credit and were regularly entrusted with trade items—salt, cotton cloth, iron, brass, and copper valued in the thousands of pounds sterling. In addition to exchanging goods for slaves, the Europeans had to pay a duty for the privilege of trading with the Efik chiefs. Though some of the slave ships anchored off the coast for up to a year, no European was ever permitted to touch the shore; they could only wait, sometimes for months, to pick up their cargo.
Apparently each major Efik settlement was ruled outwardly by an obong, or chief, who enforced laws, mediated in disputes, and led the armed forces in times of war. Besides this secular authority, however, there was a second and perhaps more powerful social and political force, a secret society called the Egbo, or leopard society. The Egbo was a male hierarchical association consisting of several ranks, each of which had a distinctive costume. Although the Egbo and the secular authority were institutionally separate, in practice powerful individuals of the tribe sat in council for both groups. Fear of the clandestine and mysterious Egbo was often exploited by members of the secret society themselves, and the obong invariably ranked high in the society.
Under a secret council of community elders that constituted the supreme judicial authority, the leopard society promulgated and enforced laws, judged important cases, recovered debts, and protected the property of its members. It enforced its laws with a broad range of sanctions. It could impose fines, prevent an individual from trading, impound property, and arrest, detain, or incarcerate offenders. Serious cases resulted in execution, by either decapitation or fatal mutilation—the victim was tied to a tree with his lower jaw sliced off.
The tribunal of the secret society determined guilt or innocence by a judgment of a most singular form. The accused was made to drink a toxic potion made from eight seeds of the Calabar bean, ground and mixed in water. In such a dose, physostigmine acts as a powerful sedative of the spinal cord, and causes progressively ascending paralysis from the feet to the waist, and eventual collapse of all muscular control, leading to death by asphyxiation. The defendant, after swallowing the poison, was ordered to stand still before a judicial gathering until the effects of the poison became noticeable. Then he was ordered to walk toward a line drawn on the ground ten feet away. If the accused was lucky enough to vomit and regurgitate the poison, he was judged innocent and allowed to depart unharmed. If he did not vomit, yet managed to reach the line, he was also deemed innocent, and quickly given a concoction of excrement mixed with water which had been used to wash the external genitalia of a female.
Most often, however, given the toxicity of the Calabar bean, the accused died a ghastly death. The body was racked with terrible convulsions, mucus flowed from the nose, the mouth shook horribly. If a person died from the ordeal, the executioner gouged out his eyes and cast the naked body into the forest.
At any one time during the later years of the slave trade, the Efik lands were crowded with newly acquired slaves, most of them thoroughly demoralized. To keep order and discipline, the Efik depended on the agents and executioners of the Egbo. During the weeks and sometimes months that the slaves were held awaiting shipment to the Americas, they must have heard of the gruesome ordeal of the Calabar bean, and many may have undergone the judgment themselves.
Here was an exciting possibility. Datura was a violently psychoactive plant well known and widely used in Africa as a stuporific poison by at least some of the peoples that had been exported to Haiti. The Calabar bean, which yields the recognized medical antidote for datura poisoning, came from the same region, and knowledge of its toxicity would almost certainly have passed across the Atlantic. African species of datura were apparently common throughout contemporary Haiti. The Calabar bean, though unreported from Haiti, has a hard outer seed coat and could have easily survived the transoceanic passage, and like datura it could have been later sown deliberately or accidentally, in the fertile soils of Saint Domingue.
Thus after a day in the library I had something concrete, a hypothesis that, however tenuous, at least fitted the sparse facts of the case. Knowledge of the pharmacological properties of these two toxic African plants presumably traveled across the Atlantic with the slaves to Saint Domingue. Then, adapted to fit new needs, or perhaps conserved as adjuncts to ancient magical practices, they provided the material basis upon which the contemporary belief in zombis was founded. My Calabar hypothesis was only conjecture, but at least it was a beginning, a skeletal framework on which other ideas and new information could be draped, until a solution to this extraordinary mystery took form.
The hypothesis was simple and elegant but, as it would turn out, quite wrong. Yet in pursuing it I had unwittingly uncovered a sociological connection that would eventually prove a key to the entire zombi phenomenon—the secret societies of the Efik.
4
White Darkness and the Living Dead
I TRAVELED to Haiti in April 1982, armed only with my tentative hypothesis, Kline’s introduction to Lamarque Douyon, the Port-au-Prince psychiatrist who had in his clinic Clairvius Narcisse, and two names I received from the BBC in London: Max Beauvoir, described as a sophisticated member of the Haitian intellectual elite and a noted authority on the vodoun religion; and Marcel Pierre, the vodoun priest, or houngan, from whom the BBC had obtained their sample of the reputed poison, a man one of their correspondents had labeled the “incarnation of evil.”
As my plane approached Haiti, it was not hard to understand why Columbus had responded as he had when asked by Isabella to describe the island of Hispaniola. He had taken the nearest piece of paper, crumpled it in his hand, and thrown it on the table. “That,” he had said, “is Hispaniola.”
Columbus had come to Haiti by way of the island of San Salvador, his first landfall in the Americas, where the natives had told enticing tales of a mountainous island where the rivers ran yellow with soft stones. The admiral found his gold, but more excitedly he discovered a tropical paradise. In rapture he wrote back to his queen that nowhere under the sun were there lands of such fertility, so void of pestilence, where the rivers were countless and the trees reached into the heavens. The native Arawaks he praised as generous and good, and he beseeched her to take them under her protection. This she did. The Spaniards introduced all the elements of sixteenth-century civilization, and as a result within fifteen years the native population was reduced from approximately half a million to sixty thousand. European rapacity carved away the forest as well, and with the disappearance of the rich stands of lignum vitae and mahogany, rosewood, and pine, the delicate tropical soils turned to dust and blackened the rivers. Now, looking out of the plane at the barren slopes and the dry, desolate landscape, I saw the European arrival on that island four h
undred years before like the coming of a plague of locusts.
The capital city of Port-au-Prince lies prostrate across a low, hot tropical plain at the head of a bay flanked on both sides by soaring mountains. Behind these mountains rise others, creating an illusion of space that absorbs Haiti’s multitudes and softens the country’s harshest statistic: a land mass of only ten thousand square miles inhabited by six million people. Port-au-Prince is a sprawling muddle of a city, on first encounter a carnival of civic chaos. A waterfront shantytown damp with laundry. Half-finished, leprous public monuments. Streets lined with flamboyant and the stench of fish and sweat, excrement and ash. Dazzling government buildings and a presidential palace so white that it doesn’t seem real. There are the cries and moans of the marketplace, the din of untuned engines, the reek of diesel fumes. It presents all the squalor and grace of any Third World capital, yet as I drove into the city for the first time, I noticed something else. The people on the street didn’t walk; they flowed, exuding pride. Physically they were beautiful. They seemed gay, careless, jaunty. Washed clean by the afternoon rain, the whole city had a rakish charm. And it wasn’t just how things appeared, it was something in the air, something electric—a raw elemental energy I had never felt elsewhere in the Americas. Yet while I sensed this feeling immediately, and remained aware of it constantly during all the months I was to spend in the country, I would not understand it for some time. That first day coming in from the airport, however, I did receive a clue—a sight I would see many times again in Haiti. There in the late afternoon sun was a single individual, quite sane and very happy, standing alone, dancing with his own shadow.
I checked into the Hotel Ollofson, a filigree mansion draped in bougainvillea and saturated with the air of that long-forgotten era when the United States occupied Haiti. Leaving my bags at the desk, I left immediately for the home of Max Beauvoir, in Mariani, south of the capital beyond a frenetic thoroughfare known as the Carrefour Road. All the traffic that drains the hinterland to the south passes here, but it is less a route than a happening, a condensation in a few kilometers of all the life and drama of the city. My driver treated it as a free-for-all, flying recklessly past stevedores bent double beneath loads of ice and charcoal, fish and furniture. From every direction kaleidoscopic “tap taps,” the Haitian buses, overflowing with nattering passengers and their goods, careened on and off the roadway in search of still more cargo. In front of shops, bossy marchand ladies flaunted their wares, artisans carved shoes out of tires, or forged carriage parts from iron bars. And everywhere Dominican girls in tight-fitting rayon hung heavy in doorways lined with caladium. It is a dirty, lively, gaudy boulevard where the roadside houses climb atop one another vying for the attention of those passing by.