She was ironing in the kitchen. As she rhythmically pressed and folded each item, she would lose herself in memories or deep thought, trying to resolve problems that troubled her. When I casually interrupted her, showed her the article and rather flippantly asked if she thought zombies actually existed, she finished a pair of trousers before stating matter-of-factly that her granddaughter Mimi was a zombie. I already knew that 13-year-old Mimi had been shot to death in her mother’s backyard shack on 13 August 1991 - more than a year previously - but I was taken aback to hear that Joyce believed she was a zombie, in thrall to a shebeen queen.

Joyce was a short 59-year-old Xhosa woman with bright humorous eyes and a quick smile. She had been working for us for a year. A fiercely independent woman, she cleaned for several different households because she refused to be beholden to a single employer. In South Africa at that time, domestic workers were not protected by any union, or entitled to a minimum wage, and could easily be exploited by their ‘masters’ and ‘madams’. Besides, she had her own life, with family, church and ancestral obligations that she did not want to sacrifice to some boss’s late dinner parties and baby-sitting obligations.

Over time, she told me the full details of the story, and I gradually came to understand the notion of zombies as a way in which people deal with trauma. Joyce had opened my eyes as no newspaper article ever had, and I discovered an entire undercurrent to the violence, where ancient beliefs that I had thought were separate from the modern nature of the political struggle were in fact woven into almost every aspect of it.

Mimi had been killed in Thokoza, that strange and dangerous black township 16 kilometres south-east of Johannesburg, where I - and the other journalists - had come to accept that anything could occur. Thokoza had the highest death toll of any township during the four years of war that began in 1990, shortly before Mandela’s release: on just one day in August 1990, for example, 143 people died in hand-to-hand combat. At one stage, there were so many casualties that the police had to leave the corpses lying in the streets for much of the day. Dogs left behind by residents fleeing the war formed ravenous packs that survived by feeding on the corpses. Joyce told me of those dogs shadowing funeral cortèges all the way to the cemetery.

Thokoza is a small, nondescript township. The main road, Khumalo Street, runs north-south for four kilometres through an elongated triangle from one set of migrant workers’ hostels to another. At its southern end, Khumalo Street turns east for a further two kilometres until it reaches three more hostels, grouped together in neighbouring Kathlehong township. We photographers got to know the roads and neighbourhoods that Khumalo Street traversed extremely well. Many of the pictures of violence we took were in that tiny area. It was on the wide dirt pavement bordering Khumalo Street that Joao photographed a man smiling at a mob of women beating another; it was across the blue-grey tar of Khumalo Street that Ken captured the moment when a young girl desperately pulled her even younger sister to safety from an impi of thousands of armed Zulus emerging from the early morning haze. The residents of Khumalo Street were regularly terrorized by the rhythmic clash of spears, stricks and sharpened steel on the hard cowhide shields which the hostel Zulus carried. This terrifying sound was punctuated by the occasional gunshot that elicited the war cry ‘Usuthu!’ from thousands of baritone throats.

The conflict in Thokoza pitted the hostel-dwellers against local householders. Migrants against residents. Most township residents regarded the hostel-dwellers as backward country bumpkins who contributed nothing to the community but discord. In tsotsitaal, the urban slang that sets city sophisticates apart from their country counterparts, the hostel-dwellers were referred to as stupids. More insultingly, they were mdlwembe - feral dogs - from the Zulu adage that says once a domestic dog has left the kraal, or homestead, and gone into the bush, it becomes wild and can never be domesticated again. For their part, Inkatha supporters often referred to their ANC opponents as isazi, or clevers, meaning deceitful city-slickers.

Most residents owed allegiance to the ANC, and relied for protection on volunteers who grouped themselves into self-defence units made up of militant youths and the occasional trained guerrillas who were given weapons by the armed wings of the liberation movements. Inside the hostels, the Zulu inhabitants were almost all combatants linked to other hostels by a controlling web of indunas or headmen, taking orders from the Inkatha leadership. This networking ensured the conflict spread rapidly from township to township, and that the ubiquitous hostels were at the centre of every conflict.

Soon, no-go areas developed around the hostels. We took to calling them the dead zones. We all passed through these no-man’s-lands countless times during the conflict, sometimes casually, sometimes scared witless and sometimes all fired up with adrenaline while chasing the bang-bang. Running through the heart of the dead zone in Thokoza was Khumalo Street. At its northern end, on the left, was a sprawling municipal hostel complex, the impregnable Inkatha stronghold to which the Zulu warriors would retreat when the fighting was going against them. The furthest of the three fortress-like hostels lining the western pavement was dubbed Madala (‘the Old One’) by residents. The middle hostel was Khuthuze (‘to be pickpocketed’), while the southernmost one, adjacent to the petrol station, was called Mshaya’zafe, a Zulu phrase meaning ‘beat him to death’.

The Zulus eventually spread out to occupy the neighbourhood of little matchbox houses opposite, and nicknamed their territory Ulundi, after the rural capital of the KwaZulu homeland that is the seat of Inkatha’s power. This area was feared and hated by non-Inkatha members, who would not dare to set foot there, just as a visit to the township was deadly for hostel Zulus. At the beginning of the war, it was possible for us to drive through Ulundi and even to enter the hostels, but as the conflict deepened and attitudes hardened, that stretch of Khumalo Street became a no-go area, though occasionally we would brave a run along it, sinking low into the car seats while racing through the stop signs and hoping no one would shoot. As the first year of the war wore on, venturing into the hostels became a scary gamble. One day it would be fine to go in, meet the induna and get permission to work, talk to people, drink a beer, photograph. On other days, when hostility ran high, we were soon met with aggression that prevented us staying or working. Later still, entering the hostels at all was out of the question.

At the other, southern, end of Khumalo Street, Khalanyoni Hostel was overrun early in the war by ANC fighters, most Xhosa tribesmen from the adjacent Phola Park shanty town. These warriors were called blanket men as they wore their initiation blankets to fight; hiding sticks, spears and guns under the heavy wool folds. They dismantled the buildings, brick by multi-coloured brick, and used them to rebuild their shacks that were destroyed in the fighting. From day to day, the shanty town transformed itself from a maze of drab corrugated iron into a bizarrely colourful place. The surviving Zulu hostel dwellers from Khalanyoni retreated to the hostels at the northern end of Khumalo Street.

Once the pass- and influx-control laws of petty apartheid were annulled in the mid-80s, many former hostel-dwellers moved into shack settlements with their families. Those from hopelessly overpopulated tribal homelands like the Transkei and Lebowa were eager to leave the countryside and move into urban townships, but Zulus continued to see life in the townships as a temporary sojourn. Their wives and families stayed on in the rural areas and the men went home to visit when work and money allowed. The system of land control in KwaZulu supported this choice: unless land remained in use by a family, it could be taken by the chief and reallocated to more productive families. Zulus were also strongly attached to traditional lands where their ancestors are buried and where their spirits resided. Zulus who died in the cities were rarely buried there - their bodies were usually taken home. One consequence of these strong rural ties was that the hostels came to be increasingly dominated by Zulus. The Zulu proclivity for murderous clan-feuds spanning generations was pursued just as viciously in the cities as they were back home. This meant that hostel Zulus were permanently prepared for conflict and organized in the traditional Zulu militarized social units, amaButho, or warrior-groups under the control of an induna.

It was these forces that were harnessed by the Inkatha political leadership and unleashed repeatedly in 1990 and 1991, in an attempt to ensure that it became a national political player. Tens of thousands of Zulus wearing red headbands and carrying spears, shields, machetes and the occasional assault rifle would surge out of the hostels and down Khumalo Street, a sea of chanting belligerence. At first they inflicted heavy casualties, until the formation of neighbourhood self-defence units evened the odds.

The conflict spawned an entire sub-culture. For the denizens, the map of Thokoza had been redrawn: Ulundi on one side, separated by the dead zone from the ANC neighbourhoods which had also been renamed. The three neighbourhoods surrounding the hostels most involved in the conflict became known as Slovo section, in honour of the Communist Party leader Joe Slovo; Lusaka section, with a nod to the Zambian capital where many exiled ANC leaders had found a home; and Mandela section.

In Mandela section, a group of young ANC fighters occupying a tiny cluster of homes in the northern-most corner of Thokoza somehow resisted the Inkatha impis. We got to know the self-defence unit there that was led by a man in his early twenties. He shared a nickname with one of the enemy hostels: ‘Madala’, they called him - ‘The old one’. He had been given the name by his fighters, most of them in their teens and still trying to balance schoolwork with warfare. From one of their bases bordering a dead zone, in a house deserted by its owners, the teenage fighters would keep watch through a brick-sized hole in the wall. The hole was large enough to fire out of, but small enough to present a minimal target to opposing snipers. The house was shared by a dozen kids and their even younger camp-followers - pre-teens who ran errands and assisted during combat. The yard would be swept clean most days when there was no fighting. The boys washed their own clothes and cooked their own meals. Racy girls would sometimes appear, especially for parties, but they were excluded from the mainstream of the fighters’ lives. Contributions from the neighbourhood residents enabled them to buy the food they needed, although some fighters took to crime to supplement the donations: Coco-Cola trucks were favourite targets for a hijacking when the boys needed money.

Some of the self-defence units earned a loyal following among the township folk, while others were simply regarded as gangsters. In Lusaka section, the fighters were proud of their heroic image. They wore bandannas and black T-shirts with ‘Lusaka Section SDU’ printed on them. They were extremely proficient in combat, silently using hand signals to communicate and moving like trained soldiers, which they were not. They could strip and reassemble the battered AK-47s they used in a matter of seconds while under fire and they had young boys to carry ammunition clips for them. The idea was to keep the spare ammunition separate from the big machines in case they got picked up by the police or army - the scarce bullets were more valuable than the rifles themselves.

The ferocity of the fighting that engulfed townships on the Reef - the highly populated swathe of mining and industrial towns centred on Johannesburg - surprised South Africans. Various factors contributed to the volatile situation. Following the release of Nelson Mandela in February 1990 and the unbanning of the liberation movements, including the ANC, the Pan-Africanist Congress and the Communist Party, political competition intensified. Decades of suppression and the liberation movement’s Marxist-influenced ideologies meant that there was no culture of political tolerance. Inkatha’s decision to transform itself from a ‘cultural movement’ into a registered political party - the Inkatha Freedom Party - and to establish a membership outside of the Zulu homeland, ensured that a climate of violence predominated. Years previously, in 1980, the KwaZulu homeland leader Mangosuthu Buthelezi had broken with the ANC when he agreed to take part in the homeland process, allowing him to gather power and a partisan homeland police force in KwaZulu-Natal province. This eventually led to open conflict with the various ANC-aligned groups inside the country, especially the United Democratic Front. The ANC by contrast refused to work within the system of apartheid, and a bloody war raged in the province for over ten years before the release of Mandela.

Within the white security forces there were government ministers, officers and foot soldiers who played an active role in helping to spark the dangerously flammable tinder that lay between the opposing sides by supplying weapons and training to Inkatha. After decades of government propaganda demonizing the liberation movements as part of an anti-Christian, Communist total onslaught against white South Africa, it was unsurprising that the average white policeman (like the average white citizen) loathed and feared ANC supporters. The antipathy was mutual. The ANC and the more radical black consciousness Pan-Africanist Congress considered all policemen legitimate targets for assassination. Ordinary black citizens hated and mistrusted police as the arm of the law that harassed, arrested and tortured them.

Relations between the police and Inkatha, however, were a different matter. It was not uncommon to see a Zulu migrant raise his hands in a show of deference or call a white policeman inkosi - ‘my lord’. The bearded white AP bureau chief Renfrew, who might have been mistaken for a policeman on a bad day, told me how he had come across a Zulu castrating a dead Xhosa in the aftermath of a battle in Thokoza in 1990. The man with the knife had turned to him and said, ‘Please, my colonel, let me finish just this one!’

The Zulu’s attitude to Renfrew should not have been surprising; Inkatha and the white regime were using each other to gain an advantage over their political opponents - primarily the ANC. The same illegal strategies being employed by the government had been tested during the election run-up in South West Africa (as neighbouring Namibia was called while it was a South African protectorate - in effect, a colony). When Pretoria was faced with the inevitability of democratic elections, officials clandestinely set about fomenting communal violence in the hope of disrupting the elections and preventing a landslide victory for the former guerrilla movement, SWAPO. They failed, in the end, to do so, but the same regime and their covert units nonetheless redirected their energies to weakening the ANC powerbase, especially within the urban areas where the liberation movement had the vast majority of support. They stopped at nothing - from gunrunning and assassination to unlawful funding and crooked justice - to ensure that Inkatha weakened the ANC enough to upset their electoral chances. One early morning in 1990, for example, I arrived at Phola Park in Thokoza just 20 minutes after the sunrise. Xhosa warriors told me that they had killed a white policeman who had led an Inkatha attack on their shacks. The policeman had had black camouflage paint on his hands and face. He had lain in the grass for hours before the police managed to retrieve his body. I had just missed a picture that would have proved the third-force theory. The first I had heard of the term ‘the third-force’ was in an ANC press conference in which they accused covert police and/or military units of provoking and indeed committing violence to disrupt black communities. It had become clear that there was a lot more to the killings than just the ANC and Inkatha attacking each other, and more than just police breaking up riotous situations.

One time in Soweto an army lieutenant complained to me from the top of his armoured vehicle that the police would not let him disarm an Inkatha impi that was rampaging through an ANC neighbourhood. Another then-inexplicable example of suspicious police behaviour was when I had raced to the scene of an explosion in Soweto, only to find white plain-clothes men, obviously cops, who threatened to kill me if I entered or if I took their pictures. They were wild, and clearly a law unto themselves. I complained to the uniformed police spokesman who was there, ‘You heard them threatening me, I am going to lay a charge!’ but he just kept walking me away from the house, he was clearly not going to side with me against them. Even though he was black, he was assisting his murderous colleagues. It was only years later that I discovered that the white men had been a part of the notorious Vlakplaas police unit responsible for assassinations, and that the explosion had been the sabotaged earphones of a Walkman tape-player exploding and ripping through the head of an ANC lawyer. Their real target had been their former Vlakplaas commander, Captain Dirk Coetzee, then being protected by the ANC in Zambia after he had spilled the beans on government hit squads. But Coetzee had not accepted the parcel mailed to him and it had been sent back to the return address, that of ANC lawyer Bheki Mlangeni, who, of course, had nothing to do with the sending of the booby-trapped Walkman in the first place. The tape inside the Walkman was marked as containing evidence on hit squads. He died as he pressed the play button. I never did get a picture showing illegal police or third-force activity. None of us ever did.

In this houses closest to the Zulu area of Thokoza, residents’ lives were tossed about like flotsam on an angry sea. The war advanced street by street, encroaching ever further into previously safe sections. Homes were burnt, windows broken, everything of value looted. Gardens were overgrown with weeds. These abandoned houses became front-line bases from which opposing sides sniped at each other, and soon one could hardly find a wall, iron gate or fence on Khumalo, Tshabalala and Mdakana streets that did not have a bullet-hole in it.

I had photographed much mayhem in Thokoza, but I had not been aware that I knew someone who had lost a loved one there. To find out that one of those many ‘violence-related incidents’ had happened to the woman who cleaned my house every Monday was disconcerting. Joyce’s granddaughter, Mimi, had lived on the very edge of that dead zone in Thokoza, in Nkaka Street. Just days before her death in August of 1991, Mimi had called Joyce to ask if she could come and stay with her in Soweto, some 30 kilometres away, as parts of the giant township were still untouched by the violence that had completely engulfed Thokoza. Joyce was delighted. Mimi was her only granddaughter and the apple of her eye, and she longed to see her again. The child had stayed with her from the age of one until she was four, while Mimi’s mother had looked for a place to stay, eventually finding a backyard shack in Thokoza. From then on, the child came regularly to stay with Joyce. Besides the ever-present threat of political violence, Mimi, just 13, was terrified of being jackrolled - the practice of certain criminal gangs of abducting and gang-raping girls for days at a stretch.

One such gang of thugs was the Bad Boys, a gang in Slovo section. They were small-time tsotsis, who had become increasingly brazen and dangerous in the now nearly-lawless township. They progressed from petty theft, mugging and burglary to armed robbery and hijacking vehicles at gun-point. One day in 1990, they had tried to rob the driver of a truck delivering milk to a neighbourhood store, owned by a Zulu businessman and founder of a small Zionist Christian sect, Bishop Mbhekiseni Khumalo. The bishop ran out of his store with the handgun he had bought especially for thugs like the Bad Boys, and fired at the fleeing tsotsis. One of the shots hit a woman in the street, killing her. The Bishop claimed that the Bad Boys had killed her, but there were many eyewitnesses to the shooting. He remained unrepentant and grew increasingly belligerent, making the neighbourhood turn against him. The incident had happened at the time, in July 1990, when Inkatha, having changed into a political party, had begun a recruitment drive. The Bishop, a Zulu, asked for Inkatha’s protection in return for promoting membership in his area. The Bishop and his new henchmen - well-armed and blooded veterans of the political conflict in KwaZulu-Natal - became known as the Khumalo Gang, and led a campaign of terror to force people to join Inkatha or leave the area. In the prevailing atmosphere, audacious groups, like the Khumalo Gang, planned and committed assassinations of opponents with impunity and ran their territories like fiefdoms, exploiting the traumatized community even further. The Bad Boys themselves were quick to take advantage of the anarchy, and jackrolling was their pastime. If the gangster saw a girl they desired, they would wait for her to come out of school, or even take her right out of her home. They would keep the girl at their hideout and repeatedly gang-rape her until they grew bored - which might take a day or a week. They would then drop her back home, telling her parents that they had enjoyed their daughter and would come back for her some time.

One day, when Joyce returned home from work to her own backyard shack in Soweto, she found her niece waiting for her, looking very disturbed. Joyce grew nervous, guessing there was bad news. When she heard that Mimi had been killed, Joyce began screaming to drown out the words.

Joyce decided to go to Thokoza immediately, even though it was getting dark and there were very few minibus taxis around. She had to use a series of taxis to get to Thokoza. Once there, it was difficult to get one to take her all the way to the place where Mimi lived because the taxis stopped travelling by six in the evening. She found a taxi and pleaded with the driver to take her, explaining the situation. He reluctantly agreed to go as far as Natalspruit Hospital at the top end of Khumalo Street, but no further. Taxis belonged to associations clearly affiliated to either Inkatha or the ANC and the driver would have had to drive through Inkatha territory to take her to her destination. She was now stranded over two kilometres from the house and the streets were eerily empty. People were too scared to be out after dark, so Joyce began to walk, both fearful of what she would find and of her own safety as she stealthily hurried along the dark streets that passed through the dead zone. She finally reached the darkened house, where Mimi’s mother Eunice and her surviving daughter had joined the landlady in hiding for fear of a further visit from the gangsters. In the gloom, Joyce heard how her granddaughter had been killed.

Mimi had been sick in bed with the ’flu and, at about eight o’clock that evening, Eunice sent her elder daughter to the shop to buy a tin of soup, because that was all the sick child would eat. On the way back she passed a gang of thugs that she recognized as members of the Bad Boys gang. They called out to her, telling her to come to them. The girl decided to make a run for it as she was close to home. They chased her but she made it home ahead of them and slammed the shack door shut behind her. Her mother was watching television with the landlady in the main house, unaware of what was happening in the backyard. The boys banged on the door, saying, ‘She is our girlfriend, we want our girlfriend; she is running away from us.’

The terrified girl hid behind the door and yelled back that she was not their girlfriend. The sound of the Bad Boys trying to break down the door woke Mimi. In her feverish, confused state, she jumped out of bed and ran into the other room of the shack, away from the door. But the thugs had come around to the window and as they broke the glass, Mimi called out to her sister, ‘Sisi, what’s going ...?’ They shot her behind the ear, the bullet coming out through her mouth. The tsotsis climbed in through the window, ignored the young girl they had just shot, and took Mimi’s screaming sister away. On the way back to their hideout, they abducted another girl from a nearby house. The girls were locked in a shack, while their captors began smoking dagga (marijuana) and drinking, getting primed for the party in which the girls would be raped. They were not in a hurry, they knew that they could keep the girls as long as they wished - the police would do nothing. At one stage, late in the night, the stoned gangsters lost concentration, and the girls seized the chance to escape.

Joyce listened to the story with growing horror and disbelief. She did not want to accept that her grandchild was dead, but as the oldest in the family, she was obliged the next day to go identify Mimi’s corpse at the government mortuary. When the mortuary attendant pulled out the drawer that contained Mimi, Joyce nearly fainted. She was naked and her one eye was hanging out of its socket. But Joyce steeled herself and examined her closely. Mimi’s hair was like it always was, blow-dried back - the tight curls fashionably relaxed, so that her hair was long and straight. The young girl’s breasts seemed surprisingly small - she had always had a large bust that Joyce used to playfully tease her about. Joyce was puzzled, did a person’s breasts shrink after they died? She was overcome by the thought that she wouldn’t see Mimi alive again.

That night, Joyce went back to Soweto. She slept uneasily and dreamt of Mimi. In the dream, Mimi hugged her as she did in life - coming up behind her grandmother and throwing her arms around her, her breasts pressing against Joyce’s back. Joyce said to her, ‘Take off your big breasts for me.’ Mimi just laughed, but Joyce insisted, asking why her breasts had been so small at the mortuary, but now they were once again their normal size. Mimi pulled away from her. Joyce turned and saw from the child’s face that she was upset. Mimi walked out of the shack and down to the street, without looking back, and then Joyce woke up. She could not get back to sleep and, in the morning, she told her daughter Tamara about the dream. Tamara reassured her that it was just a dream, that it meant nothing. But Joyce was deeply troubled, not just by the death, but by the idea that something unnatural had been visited on Mimi. She told her sister about the dream, who insisted they visit a traditional spirit medium, a sangoma, to see if anything supernatural had occurred. They asked around and were directed to a young sangoma. He put on his animal skin cloak to speak to his ancestors, and then he asked Joyce if she had come to see him about a female. Joyce said, ‘Yes.’ He asked if the person had been shot, and they believed her to be dead. Joyce said that this was true. The sangoma told them that she was not dead. ‘She is alive. She is being kept where she used to live.’ He said that she was a zombie and described the zombie’s mistress. To Joyce, the sangoma’s description fitted that of Mimi’s middle-aged landlady. Joyce and her sister paid and left. They wanted to be sure, so they went to two more sangomas, both of whom told them the same thing. For Joyce, it was a glimmer of hope - if Mimi was not dead, but a zombie, then a powerful sangoma could free her from the curse and return Mimi to her.

Ten days later, Joyce returned to Thokoza for the funeral. She had to dress Mimi’s body. She had brought a pair of panties and a new T-shirt, but she was shaking badly when she approached the body. This time the body seemed different. Mimi’s breasts were soft, as if they were an old woman’s, and her torso was limp, but when Joyce pulled the panties on, she was surprised that from the waist down, her body was as hard as iron. The girl’s hair had been cut short, but it looked as if it was growing. Joyce began wondering why her hair was so short, why the breasts were like that, and why she was not completely stiff like a dead person should be? Her suspicions that Mimi was not really dead were strengthened.

After the church service, the schoolchildren proceeded to the graveyard on foot. They sang, ‘Mimi, we loved you. Mimi, we loved you,’ as they danced the militant toyi-toyi all the way to the cemetery. It was a large funeral with two bishops, three priests and several church choirs at the graveside. Joyce thought it was wonderful, except that it hurt so much because it was Mimi who was being buried.

The following day, Joyce and the family had to perform the traditional cleaning that follows a death - washing the blankets, linen and clothes of everyone in the house. Joyce returned to Soweto and went to see sangomas again, but different ones each time. It was unsettling and frightening, because they told her the same thing, all of them. They said that Mimi was working for the landlady, running her shebeen for her. Joyce was by now utterly convinced that Mimi was a zombie.

A week later, her Soweto neighbour ran over and told Joyce to switch on the radio, to listen to what was happening in Thokoza. The schoolchildren had caught up with one of the killers. They had tortured him until he gave up the names and whereabouts of the other Bad Boys who had taken part in Mimi’s killing. The children hunted them all down, and then stoned and burned them to death. But revenge did nothing to assuage the pain and anguish Joyce felt: she continued to dream of her granddaughter. In one recurrent dream, Mimi asked Joyce to come and fetch her because she could not escape by herself. But when Joyce asked her where she was being held, Mimi would just point, then vanish.

Joyce never accused the landlady of making Mimi into a zombie - she had no proof. Her only hope was to find a sangoma who could break the spell Mimi was under, who could exert enough supernatural power to free Mimi from her captor’s sorcery. She spent much of her scarce savings on charlatans who said they could help, but without success. I came to understand the zombie business as Joyce’s way of clinging to hope. If she forsook the possibility that Mimi was not really dead, then she would have to face the fact that her grandchild was never coming home again. But Joyce’s continued hope that one day her beloved Mimi would return masked a deep despair: ‘I know nothing about zombies, honestly. People say that they exist for a long time, until God takes them. Then they die.’

Sometimes I would grow angry with her, hearing of yet another experience of wasted money and dashed expectations. But I came to see that I was wrong, and rather than trying to divert Joyce from her superstition, I learnt that everyone has their own way of dealing with trauma. Joyce’s belief that Mimi was not really dead was not so different from my own belief that God would spare my mother from cancer.