It’s time to shed those gold rings. Yep, even in private places, lest you be accused of witchcraft:

Rumors of penis theft [are] circulating in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo’s sprawling capital of some 8 million inhabitants. They quickly dominated radio call-in shows, with listeners advised to beware of fellow passengers in communal taxis wearing gold rings.

Purported victims, 14 of whom were also detained by police, claimed that sorcerers simply touched them to make their genitals shrink or disappear, in what some residents said was an attempt to extort cash with the promise of a cure.

“You just have to be accused of that, and people come after you. We’ve had a number of attempted lynchings. … You see them covered in marks after being beaten,” said Kinshasa’s police chief, Jean-Dieudonne Oleko.

Cash for shrinking penises? Sounds like hetro women and gay men should be collecting every time their lovers ejaculate. I wonder if there’s a going rate or if witchy women get to set their own prices.

Cops have a long history of trying to break up sex schemes; at least this time they aren’t arresting the accused.

“…when you try to tell the victims that their penises are still there, they tell you that it’s become tiny or that they’ve become impotent. To that I tell them, ‘How do you know if you haven’t gone home and tried it’,” he said.

Of course, this could just be another size obsession among flashers. When I ponder the words of witness Kalala, I have visions of exhibitionists standing on street corners closely examining each other’s packages with measuring tapes and magnifiers.

“It’s real. Just yesterday here, there was a man who was a victim. We saw. What was left was tiny,” said 29-year-old Alain Kalala, who sells phone credits near a Kinshasa police station.

 
Curiousity about this phenomenon led to an Internet search. Who knew this fear was so widespread? There are documented instances dating back more than a hundred years. While it may strike us as bizarre or funny, for those accused it is tragic. Often they suffer horrific violence and/or death.

7 killed in Ghana over ‘penis-snatching’ episodes
January 18, 1997

ACCRA, Ghana (CNN) — Seven sorcerers who were accused of grabbing penises were beaten to death by angry mobs in the Ghana capital of Accra, police said. The capital is so chaotic the army may have to be called in to restore order. According to police, two men were lynched Thursday and by Friday the death toll had risen to seven.

The fear of witchcraft drives these attacks which is so predominate it easily degenerates into mob rule. Women and chilildren are the prmiary targets of most African witchcraft accusations, just as they were in Europe centuries ago. Yet these accusations of sorcery also include men and foriegners. Some reports expressed the opinion that these accusations are a reflection of tribal fears of strangers and are used as a means of repelling those who might want to invade and conquer.

Police in Congo have arrested 13 suspected sorcerers accused of using black magic to steal or shrink men’s penises after a wave of panic and attempted lynchings triggered by the alleged witchcraft.

According to news bulletins out of West Africa earlier this month, lynch mobs were roaming the streets of Senegal hunting down foreigners believed to be sorcerers with the power to steal (i.e., shrink) men’s penises. Allegedly, a handshake is all it takes.

Authorities in the capital city, Dakar, were frustrated in their attempts to defuse public hysteria after local newspapers began publishing photos of the purported “sex thieves” and a radio disc jockey claimed he had personally witnessed the “shriveled genitals” of a victim. …The phenomenon would be strictly laughable had not at least eight of the scores of suspected perpetrators attacked so far by vigilantes in Dakar and Ziguinghor been beaten or burned to death.

The authorities in Benin have ordered security forces to curb violence in the commercial capital, Cotonou, following the deaths of five people by vigilantes. There have been reports of at least 10 such attacks since Saturday. Four of those who died were burned, another man was hacked to death….The BBC’s Karim Okanla in Cotonou says these attacks begin by someone screaming that that they have been robbed of their penis. An angry mob would then descend on any passer-by deemed to look suspicious, strip them naked and then douse them in petrol before setting them alight. No one in the crowd would stop to question their actions or ask whether the accused might possess magical powers, he says.

The penis-theft meme is believed to have migrated from the neighboring countries of Cameroon, Ivory Coast, and Ghana, where similar mob scenes were reported earlier this year. Outbreaks of magical “penis shrinking” or “penis snatching” are not uncommon in West Africa.

One wonders why these men are so open as to pubicly shout their penises are gone or shrunken. Would men in America feel as free? Given that penis size seems to matter greatly to men in this nation, it would seem logical they wouldn’t want others to know if they believed this happened. So what is it about the African male that enables them to disregard this “shaming” factor? Would our men benefit by their openness, sans the superstitions?

This primitive fears are also found in Asia, where it has aquired the name “Koro.” A Hong Kong study defined those who suffer from the affliction as a man who is insecure over his sexuality

The syndrome is usually to be found among young men of poor education and immature, dependent personality who lack confidence in their own virility and are in conflict over the expression of genital impulses, although some may show hypersexual tendencies. The presenting complaint of penile shrinkage is shown to be in fact a depersonalization of that organ, occurring in the context of acute anxiety with fears of dissolution.

But does that definitin fit into reports of mass hysteria? If so, what in the culture produces such widespread fears?

Mass-hysteria with Koro-symptoms in Thailand

Koro, a psychogenic anxiety syndrome interfering with genital body image and sexual functioning, has hitherto been described as occurring mainly in isolated cases of South Chinese males. The present communication reports an epidemic outbreak in November 1976 in Northeastern Thailand where within a few days at least 200 patients, most of them Thai and two-thirds males, were treated at local hospitals.

Two-thirds male? That means one-third were women who suffered from the female version. What part would that entail? It proved impossible to find any study that addressed this from a female perspective. In the few who did include female sufferers, the women were included as an unusual exception while the study itself focused on the men. Although the syndrome is mentioned in studies as early as 1897, women weren’t mentioned for four more decades

Suk-Yeong or Koro—A culture-bound depersonalization syndrome

From The Hong Kong Psychiatric Centre, Mental Health Service, Hong Kong

In 1936 Van Wulftten Palthe mentioned the existence of corresponding female cases who complained of shrinking of the vaginal labia and the breasts.

So both men and women who are afflicted suffer from fears of losing their sexual identity. In our culture, we express those fears via the surgeon’s scalpel, augmenting our body parts in order to convince ourselves we are still sexually desirable. Perhaps the only thing superior about our method is that we aren’t killing people because of our sexual fears.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 20th, 2008 at 11:03 pm and is filed under Body Parts, Humor, Men, Religion, Women. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.