Your question recalled to me a section of the David Graeber book "Debt: the First 5000 Years."
The Tiv people of West Africa have a belief system which includes fear of a sort of spiritual debt incurred by cannibalism . Graeber describes it by saying that
for centuries, most [of the Tiv] appear to have been veritably obsessed by the suspicion that some of their neighbors—and particularly prominent men who became de facto political leaders—were, in fact, secret cannibals. Men who built up their tsav by such means, the stories went, attained extraordinary powers: the ability to My, to become impervious to weapons, to be able to send out their souls at night to kill their victims in such a way that their victims did not even know that they were dead, but would wander about, confused and feckless, to be harvested for their cannibal feasts. They became, in short, terrifying witches. The mbatsav, or society of witches, was always looking for new members, and the way to accomplish this was to trick people into eating human flesh. A witch would take a piece of the body of one of his own close relatives, who he had murdered, and place it in the victim's food. If the man was foolish enough to eat it, he would contract a "flesh-debt," and the society of witches ensured that flesh-debts are always paid.
Graeber connects this belief with the slave trade by saying that
If the Tiv, then, were haunted by the vision of an insidious secret organization that lured unsuspecting victims into debt traps, whereby they themselves became the enforcers of debts to be paid with the bodies of their children, and ultimately, themselves—one reason was because this was, literally happening to people who lived a few hundred miles away. Nor is the use of the phrase "flesh-debt" in any way inappropriate. Slave-traders might not have been reducing their victims to meat, but they were certainly reducing them to nothing more than bodies.
You should probably look at voodoo practices in Haiti. When someone had committed a crime, the local spiritual teacher or authority would be consulted on complex matters of punishment, justice, and peace of mind. One punishment that became very well known today was being turned into a nzambi, or zombie. They weren't fast, slow(eh, technically maybe), or undead. zombies suffered a fate far worse than death, they were slaves.
Using a mix of pufferfish toxin(tetrodotoxin) and a deliriant similar to datura eponymously called the zombie cucumber, Haitian shamans called bokors actually made zombies. first the bokor would put a man into a coma using the pufferfish toxin and lower vital signs to appear like the person had died***. Then they were buried alive. The lowered heart rate and breathing from the tetrodotoxin is theorized and probably how they were able to survive being buried alive for an extended period. then they were given the delirant and rendered extremely suggestable. The zombie was then taken to a remote piece of land and sold into forced labor.
Becoming a zombie was an analogy for the experience of slavery. Now that might be obvious but what makes the haitian zombie interesting is how intensely self reflexive it is in historical context. voodoo is a mix of various african cultures and religions being forced together under colonial slavery, appropriating from one another and surviving under the name of voodoo. voodoo was a religion made by slaves, for slaves, and features a fear myth about enslavement. Making slavery uncool has never been so cool.
***fun fact: there is a law in japan (where pufferfish fugu is a delicacy) that bodies must be left out for three days if it is suspected that they could have consumed pufferfish. this is because some of those bodies have been known to spontaneously wake up after being declared dead.