Is it just a coincident or was there something behind it? I know that at times how people creates/make-up stories about their enemies to show how evil or scary that person is (like Viking drinking from the skulls of their enemies or other stories) so was this the case or was it something else?
Thanks
It's basically a coincidence.
the word "Zombie" first appears in English to describe the Brazilian qilombo leader Zumbi dos Palmares. It seems very likely that "Zumbi" was an inherited title, because his uncle was the first leader of the Palmares qilombo, and had the name/title Ganga Zumba or in kikongo nganga a nzumbi which means something like "priest in charge of the spiritual defense of the community" or perhaps "priest of Nzambi a Mpungu (the high creator god)".
But, the modern concept of Zombie is very clearly from the Haitian creole word Zonbi (or in French it would be Zombi) which refers to a person's spirit which has been either 1) had a fragment "captured" and trapped inside a bottle or container. This is called zonbi astral 2) used to reanimate a corpse to do the bidding of a sorcerer in a slave-like state. (the more familiar form of "zombie" to Americans).^1
Now, Oxford English Dictionary traces the etymology of Zombie/Zombi/Zonbi back to an undetermined West African language, and notes the parallels with the kikongo word zumbi meaning a "fetish" or spiritual power-object, or nzambi meaning a god.
So, the names Zumbi dos Palmares and Ganga Zumba are possibly related to Zombie/Zonbi in that they all derive from kikongo word zumbi or nzambi (or a similar word from another Niger-Bantu family language). But modern zombie myth does not come from some sort of propaganda effort to demonize Zumbi dos Palmares.
Also, scholars like John Thornton have suggested that the motif of the "flesh eating zombie" might come from African folk-memory of the slave trade. In short, Thornton argues that in Kongo belief, enslaving someone and forcing them to work for you constituted "consuming their vital force".
Thus, there were widespread folk-myths during the slave-trade era that described the Imbangala as cannibals which Thornton would interpret as popular memory of Imbangala participation in the slave trade. Or myths of European sailors as vampires, an explanation for why enslaved people enter ships and those people are never seen again (because they are brought to the Americas).^2
It is quite clear that African beliefs crossed the Atlantic in the slave trade, and spiritual beliefs survived as religions like Vodun, Candomble, Santeria, or as Hoodoo in the Southern United States.
So, Thornton argues that this idiom of cannibalism also made the crossing. But, crucially, the idea would be that the Bokor (sorcerer) is the cannibal, because he is the one who is consuming the vital force of the Zonbis spirit. Just as the enslaver is the cannibal because he consumes the vital force of the enslaved on the sugar plantation to become wealthy and powerful.
At some point, probably when the Zombie myth became popularized in American pulp horror stories and early cinema, the cannibalism element became confused and the stories made the reanimated corpse into a flesh eater.
1 Slaves, Cannibals and Infected Hyper-Whites: the Race and Religion of Zombies by Elizabeth McAllister. see pp 457 and pp 462. Pdf warning.
2 "Cannibals, Witches and Slave Traders in the Atlantic World" by John K Thornton. The William and Mary Quarterly Vol. 60, No. 2 (Apr., 2003), pp. 273-294 https://www.jstor.org/stable/3491764