Jacob Nyathi Character Analysis

Nyathi witnessed the first big zombie attack on people which captured the world’s attention. This occurred early one morning in a small township outside of Cape Town, South Africa, among the huts and shanties in a poor neighborhood. Nyathi was returning from work when he saw people screaming and running, and heard gunshots. Soon, he encountered a horde of zombies but managed to escape. The South African police shot him, mistaking him for a zombie, and when he was recovering in a hospital, he heard everyone talking about the incident and the disease they had named “African rabies.” Nyathi’s account shows the first time that the zombies attacked en masse and caused enough destruction and death that they could no longer be ignored. However, people’s understanding of the virus was poor in those early days, and misclassifying it as a type of rabies would end up confusing people later (especially in America when Breckinridge Scott would falsely market a rabies vaccine as a preventative against the zombie virus).