The original idea for zombies came from Haiti, and the first zombie movie White Zombie starring Bela Lugosi takes place there. The tradition in Haiti is that a voodoo priest or priestess can raise the dead through sorcery, or administer a powerful drug to put people into a temporary coma that appears to be death, and then dig them up and revive them later. They then force the zombies to harvest sugar cane or do other hard labor at night when the other villagers can’t see them. So essentially the zombie becomes a slave. This zombie paradigm seems to be just as close to the author’s situation as the George Romero version.