Night of the Living Burkinabé

I've always liked zombies. Probably because I'm so interested in psychology that the idea of people who have lost their human characteristics and are essentially walking brain stems appeals to me. Or maybe I just like seeing people shoot monsters in the head with a shotgun. Either way, I was excited to see that there's a new Resident Evil game coming out. Then I saw that it's set in Africa. And the funny thing is, it looks and feels just like Africa: the women in their pagnes, the men drinking giant beers, the mud brick buildings with roofs made out of metal sheets, the goats and chickens. How cool!

There's something about Africa, though, that causes people to freak out and get all sensitive. They start using vague terms like "heritage" and "tribal culture" and "tradition." And that's fine, usually, because Africans certainly have a long, interesting history that influences their modern lives quite a bit. But just because African farming technology hasn't improved much in the last several hundred years and women pound millet just like their mothers' mothers' mothers did doesn't mean Africans are dumb and vulnerable and need to be defended from the evils of Hollywood or video game makers.

I'm sure that if I explained to my old students that there's a video game in which you have to shoot rabid, killer Africans that look just like them, their heads would explode. Like, literally explode. On a scale of 1 to 10 with 1 being a picture of a seed germinating (looking up from their notes for a moment to glance at the picture), 7 being a picture of a jellyfish (cries of "That's an animal?!"), and 10 being my see-through human body book (barely contained chaos), a video game in which zombie Harounas and Salimatas run at the screen before getting a shotgun blast to the head would be at least an 11.

And the reason why is because my students wouldn't care that the person doing the shooting is a white guy, and they wouldn't care that one of the weapons used against the African zombies is a machete. They wouldn't care about any of that because they'd be too busy saying "Holy crap, ZOMBIES!" Because they would know that when it comes to zombies, it don't matter if you're black or white.