kaos

Zobop passports
by Joel Biroco
I saw a photograph of a zobop passport in Voodoo: Truth and Fantasy by Laënnec Hubon
(London: Thames and Hudson, 1995, p 63). A zobop is a sorcerer belonging to a secret
society in Haiti. Apparently these passport documents allowed the bearer to roam freely
by day and by night without being molested. The photograph of the zobop passport
inspired me to create a series of zobop passports in watercolour and Indian ink, a couple
of which are shown here in KAOS (pages 66 and 78).
But the question arose in my mind as to who might be checking these passport
documents, so I did a little research and came across a fascinating article from the
Summer 1979 issue of Magonia (http://www.magonia.demon.co.uk/arc/70/haiti.html).
In “An abduction syndrome in Haitian folklore”, Peter Rogerson, seeking parallels
between ufo abduction stories and folkloric abduction stories, draws attention to a
passage in Alfred Metraux’s 1959 book Voodoo in Haiti concerning a panic that gripped
Haitian peasants, probably in the 1940s, about a motor car that was said to abduct
people. Rogerson notes:
In the capital Port-au-Prince the car was known as the auto-tigre (tiger-car); in Marbial,
where Metraux conducted his fieldwork, it was the motor-zobop, a vehicle supposedly
driven by the zobop, members of a secret society of sorcerers having many of the
characteristics of traditional witches. This car had bluish beams for its headlights.
Metraux spoke to several people who claimed to have been abducted by the motorzobop
who said they had managed to escape because they were protected by voodoo.
Rogerson doesn’t mention zobop passports, but clearly such an item would have been
useful if you came across the motor-zobop late one night. Wade Davis in The Serpent
and the Rainbow suggests the zobop and other secret societies were “a quasi-political
arm of the vodoun society” (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985, p 211–212). Manuel
Carballal says: “The Zobop terrorized the population by kidnapping in the dark of
night anyone considered a traitor to the community in order to ‘bring them to justice’
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