For Real - African Penis Snatching is Back Up!!!

by AK - Jeff 8 Replies latest social current

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  AK - Jeff

  http://www.reuters.com/article/oddlyEnoughNews/idUSN2319603620080424?feedType=nl&feedName=usoddlyenough

  Penis theft panic hits city...

  Thu Apr 24, 2008 9:47am EDT

  By Joe Bavier

  KINSHASA (Reuters) - 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.

  Reports of so-called penis snatching are not uncommon in West Africa, where belief in traditional religions and witchcraft remains widespread, and where ritual killings to obtain blood or body parts still occur.

  Rumors of penis theft began circulating last week 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," Kinshasa's police chief, Jean-Dieudonne Oleko, told Reuters on Tuesday.

  Police arrested the accused sorcerers and their victims in an effort to avoid the sort of bloodshed seen in Ghana a decade ago, when 12 suspected penis snatchers were beaten to death by angry mobs. The 27 men have since been released.

  "I'm tempted to say it's one huge joke," Oleko said.

  "But 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.

  Some Kinshasa residents accuse a separatist sect from nearby Bas-Congo province of being behind the witchcraft in revenge for a recent government crackdown on its members.

  "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.

  (Editing by Nick Tattersall and Mary Gabriel)

  I thought I had heard everything!!

  Jeff
• 

  Rabbit

  Damn, Jeff..ya' beat me to it. I had it copied to post.

  I couldn't help, while reading this article, thinking about the words 'cognitive dissonance'. A common fundamentalist/cult religious trait.

  Like this quote:

  "I'm tempted to say it's one huge joke," Oleko said.

  "But 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.

  Sounds like a JWism trait, too. They don't believe what they see in evidence.
• 

  kwintestal

  Hmm ... sounds like someone taking advantage of a situation to explain their own shortcummings.

  Kwin
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  BFD

  Maybe now I've heard everything?

  BFD
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  AlmostAtheist

  "Well yeah, it's small NOW Baby! But you shoulda seen me before that damn witch-doctor touched me!"

  I'm with Kwin on this one.

  Dave
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  snowbird

  Please don't tell Saywhat29.

  Sylvia
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  wings

  Don't quite know what to say AK, I'm learning a lot today.
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  Leolaia

  Some info in a journal article by Charles Mather, "Accusations of Genital Theft: A Case From Northern Ghana", published in Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry (Vol. 29), 2005:

  Since the 1990s, mob lynching of accused penis snatchers has occurred in Cameroon (Jackson 1998: 49), Ghana (CNN January 18, 1997), Ivory Coast (Geller 1997), and Nigeria (Ilechukwu 1992). More recently, there are reports of accusations of penis snatching from Gambia (Kamara 2002; Legally-Cole 2002). News reports summarize a popular viewpoint depicting genital theft as a crime committed by individuals and groups who have magical powers or medicines that make genitals disappear. The magic is activated when a sorcerer touches, greets, or shakes the victim’s hand. Sorcerers steal genitals and then offer their distraught victims medicines to reverse the effects of their magic. My interpreter and two of his friends described genital theft as a confidence game: one criminal steals the genitals, another provides the medicines to cure the condition and the victim is unaware that the two criminals are working together.
  

  Parallels exist between West African genital theft and koro, a phenomenon from Southeast Asia. A Malay term, koro has come to refer to episodes occurring in Southeast Asia (even though alternate terms exist for these phenomena in other languages and countries), and to patient cases in the medical literature. Individuals suffering from koro experience anxiety attacks and have the pronounced fear that their genitals are retracting into their abdomen, and they believe that as a consequence they will die (see Bartholomew 2000: 91–125; Chowdhury 1996; Edwards 1984, for thorough reviews). Like the symptoms suffered by victims of genital theft in West Africa, in Southeastern Asia koro and its variants can spread through a territory and population, assuming epidemic form. Examples include an outbreak in Singapore in the late 1960s (Gwee 1968), and a major epidemic in China’s Guandong province in the mid 1980s (Cheng 1996; Tseng et al. 1992). Unlike penis snatching, koro episodes do not involve mob lynching, though koro beliefs can be associated with, among other things, beliefs in magic and malicious evildoers (Wen 1998).

  Reports of koro-like episodes appear in Chinese texts as early as 2200 years ago (Bartholomew 2000: 93). Western medical literature notes occurrences of koro as early as the 1890s (Edwards 1984: 1–3), and after seventy-odd years of cursory reports on and tentative explanations for the phenomena, Yap incorporated koro into psychiatric nosology in the 1960s (Yap 1977). In Yap’s terminology, koro is a “culture-bound reactive syndrome.” ... Koro is an atypical variation of reactive psychosis, consisting of a depersonalization state (localized to the genitals) tied to severe anxiety (including panic attacks) resulting from unrealistic fears (that genitals can disappear and that the disappearance of genitals leads to death).

  http://www.springerlink.com/content/r86687608v12525g/fulltext.pdf
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  sacolton

  The CDC has been talking to Ron Jeremy as a possible host for an antidote.

  I might try to grab a few of those antidotes myself.