good grief...

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20080422/od_ ... witchcraft

Lynchings in Congo as penis theft panic hits capital

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.

Rumours 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.

(For full Reuters Africa coverage and to have your say on the top issues, visit: http://africa.reuters.com/ )

:shakemitk

This is no surprise to me as it's quite common in Africa to believe in witchcraft. When I was in Swaziland last year (it's a small country between South Africa and Mozambique, about the size of the US state of New Jersey) I went on a tour of a game preserve and our driver told us that witchcraft was illegal. When we reached the top of the mountain he showed us the peak of the mountain (just off the trail we were on) and said this is where they used to march the witches and force them to jump off. If they didn't jump, they were encouraged off at the point of a spear.

Fortunately today, being a witch in Swaziland doesn't carry a penalty of death, and now the guilty only have to go to prison for four years. When informed of this, my traveling companion and I looked at each other to as if to say, "Sounds reasonable to me!"

Incidentally, the same sentence is also applied for being gay in Swaziland, so my friend and I kept our mouths shut about our sexuality while we were there. I can't imagine what being white in a Swazi jail would be like.

I find it amazing that somewhere so beautiful can be so backwards.

It's not really "theft," like, "I woke up this morning and my penis was missing again." It's a metaphor for impotence, which, like many primitive cultures, most African tribes think means you're less manly or there's something wrong with your masculinity. They came up with a way to blame women for it so they could take some kind of action to make themselves feel better, which usually solves the impotence problem.