Imagine waking up one morning and your penis or vagina has disappeared. I know, right. Grim. It’s not something I would have really thought about until the subject was brought up on a pan-African investigative journalism group to which I belong.
Someone wrote something about how belief in the supernatural theft of private parts has driven recent waves of fatal mob justice in Southern Africa, saying that this was “fake news” at work, and asking why fact-checkers are getting it wrong. A slightly befuddling question, I thought. What could fact-checkers have to do with magical disappearing penises?
Panic about disappearing genitalia has a long history in Africa, it turns out. Genital theft is basically the idea that someone has used magic to make your genitals shrink or disappear.
A 2013 story in Pacific Standard magazine, for example, relates a tale from the Central African Republic. “Elaborate greetings are the norm, I’ve found, when one enters a Central African village. So it was a surprise when I noticed that many people weren’t shaking hands the morning I arrived in Tiringoulou, a town of about 2,000 people in one of the remotest corners of the Central African Republic, in March 2010. I soon found out the reason: the day before, a traveller passing through town on a Sudanese merchant truck had, with a simple handshake, removed two men’s penises.”
Quite the skill, that.
The earliest documented reports of genital theft panic in Africa date to the 1970s and early 1980s in Western Nigeria, when newspapers began reporting incidents of genital shrinking. A Harper’s article describes an early incident as told by a psychiatrist named Dr Sunday Ilechukwu.
“In 1975, while posted in Kaduna, in the north of Nigeria, Dr Ilechukwu was sitting in his office when a policeman escorted in two men and asked for a medical assessment. One of the men had accused the other of making his penis disappear. This had caused a major disturbance in the street. As Ilechukwu tells it, the victim stared straight ahead during the examination, after which the doctor pronounced him normal. ‘Exclaiming,’ Ilechukwu wrote, ‘the patient looked down at his groin for the first time, suggesting that the genitals had just reappeared.’”
Apparently, a wave of penis theft swept Nigeria between 1975 and 1977, and then there was a lull until it started again in 1990. Men could be seen in the streets of Lagos holding on to their genitalia either openly or discreetly with their hand in their pocket. Vigilance and anticipatory aggression were thought to be good prophylaxes. This led to a further breakdown of law and order. In a typical incident someone would suddenly yell: “Thief! My genitals are gone!” Then a culprit would be identified, apprehended and often killed.
The most recent outbreak was in Tanzania in early April, with multiple incidents reported. According to Tanzania’s Daily News, police arrested at least 10 people in Zanzibar’s Mjini Magharibi region for falsely claiming their genitals had been stolen, which prompted mob attacks on the accused penis thieves.
The panic resulted in at least one death when 50-year-old primary school teacher Henry Myuwanga was killed by a mob in Rukwa after being accused of causing a shopkeeper’s genitals to disappear during a dispute over the price of soap.
“A young shopkeeper, Clement Simchimba, still at large, allegedly accused the teacher of ‘grabbing him and causing his genitals to disappear’, which enraged villagers. The villagers assaulted the teacher by throwing stones and eventually burnt his body.” Police have arrested 25 people in connection with the incident, while a search continues for more suspects.
For those of you muttering that unforgivable phrase “only in Africa”, genital theft is not confined to the continent, and it’s not new. Harper’s magazine records that its invention can be claimed by the Chinese. “The first known reports of ‘genital retraction’ date to around 300BCE when the mortal dangers of suo-yang, or ‘shrinking penis’, were briefly sketched in the Nei Ching, the Yellow Emperor’s Classic Text of Internal Medicine.”
Given the way our xenophobic political and community groups look for any excuse to attack foreigners, one hopes that genital theft isn’t next on their list of useful idiocies
According to Mental Floss, one of the first records of what they called “penis panics” occurred in Central Europe in the 15th and 16th centuries, when men claimed witches were stealing their penises and hoarding them in birds’ nests. This is described by a clergyman in the Malleus Maleficarum (1486), a medieval treatise on witches.
“Witches collect male organs in great numbers, as many as 20 or 30 members together, and put them in a bird’s nest, or shut them in a box. They move themselves like living members and eat oats and corn, as has been seen by many.”
The clergyman also reported that witches would sometimes take pity on their victims. When one man asked a witch to restore his missing member, “she told the afflicted man to climb a tree … and take which he liked out of a nest where there were several members ... When he tried to take the big one, the witch said: ‘You must not take that one, because it belonged to a parish priest.’“
In October and November of 1967, Singapore’s General Hospital treated 454 men who believed their penises were shrinking. At the peak of the outbreak, 97 men sought medical intervention in a single day. Seventeen years after Singapore’s penis panic, China suffered an outbreak of its own. Three thousand people were treated between 1984 and 1985. Mental Floss reports that “unlike the previous panic in Singapore, victims didn’t swarm local hospitals. Instead, most sought natural cures. To stave off shrinkage, victims physically pulled at their sexual organs while being fed red pepper, black pepper, pepper jam or ginger juice.”
A story of an outbreak in Sudan in 2003 has some intriguing detail, including antisemitism. According to Mental Floss, one victim told a British newspaper that “while he was at the market, a man approached him, gave him a comb, and asked him to comb his hair. When he did so, within seconds, he felt a strange sensation and discovered that he had lost his penis.”
A Sudanese columnist put some thought into analysing this method. “No doubt, this comb was a laser-controlled surgical robot that penetrates the skull, [passes] to the lower body and emasculates a man!!” He argued that the robots were the work of “an imperialist Zionist agent sent to prevent our people from procreating and multiplying”. The Sudanese police arrested about 50 people on charges of sorcery and fraud. Another 40 were arrested for inciting public panic and for “complaining”.
All this sounds decidedly risible, but it’s worth noting that this is an actual, clinically defined disease. It’s called Koro syndrome, rather sweetly derived from the Malay word for “head of a tortoise”. Koro is described by the National Library of Medicine as “a multi-tiered disease presenting as an overwhelming belief that one’s sex organs are shrinking into their body. Moderate to severe anxiety attacks are associated with the condition, along with a fear of imminent death. The condition typically affects young males who believe in sex-related myths, and many individuals can co-present with anxiety, depression, or even psychosis.”
Strangely enough, South Africa seems to have been immune to genital theft psychosis. I’m not sure why. Perhaps it’s because we have actual genital theft, in the “muti” murders where body parts, including genitals, are forcibly removed from living victims for use in traditional medicine. Instead of imaginary disappearances triggering mob violence against accused sorcerers, South Africa experiences real murders where perpetrators harvest body parts for ritual purposes.
As Frank Bures explains in Harper’s, “these conditions are not purely psychogenic, as psychiatry’s universalists once held all things must be. They are also sociogenic, or emerging from the social fabric.” Given the way our xenophobic political and community groups look for any excuse to attack foreigners, one hopes that genital theft isn’t next on their list of useful idiocies.
What’s certain is that fact-checkers aren’t going to be much use in mitigating this. The excellent West African fact-checkers Dubawa did fact-check a picture of someone whose penis had been stolen, which — surprise! — turned out to be a digitally altered fake. But you can’t fact-check someone’s brain, alas. That’s up to the social fabric in which it’s tempered and, so far, ours is holding firm.
