Psychic Penis Theift Snatching
Posted: Sat Mar 16, 2013 5:34 pm
This article should be of interest to the denizens of this zoo.
Penis Snatching on the Rise -- Africas Genital-Stealing Crime Wave Hits the Countryside
All part of an illicit and lucrative trade in organs.
March 14, 2013 |
Elaborate greetings are the norm, Ive found, when one enters a Central African village. So it was a surprise when I noticed that many people werent 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 traveler passing through town on a Sudanese merchant truck had, with a simple handshake, removed two mens penises.
As best I could reconstruct from witness accounts, the stranger had stopped to purchase a cup of tea at the market. After handing over his money, he clasped the vendors hand. The tea seller felt an electric tingling course through his body and immediately sensed that his penis had shrunk to a size smaller than that of a babys. His yells quickly drew a crowd. Somehow in the fray a second man fell victim as well.
Hearing all this, I was less shocked than intrigued. As an anthropologist who studies the region, I was familiar with the problem of penis snatching. What surprised me was that the phenomenonor, depending on your perspective, the rumorhad made it as far as Tiringoulou.
Reports of genital theft have spread like an epidemic across West and Central Africa over the past two decades, in tandem with what appears to be a general resurgence of witchcraft on the continent. Anthropologists have explained this rise as a response to an increasingly mystifying and capricious global economy. Which is to say that when the workings of capital are as genuinely obscure as they are in todays Africa, proceeding behind a veil of complexity and corruption, rumors of occult economiesoften involving a trade in human organsoffer a less mystifying explanation for the radical disparities in wealth on display.
That said, genital theft is neither new nor confined to Africa. Similar panics afflicted Central Europe in the 15th and 16th centuries. (Malleus Maleficarum, a book-length jeremiad against the dangers of witchcraft from 1486, includes a discussion of sorceresses who take away male members and keep them in birds nests.) And in 1967, an outbreak of korothe belief that the penis is retracting into the bodyoverwhelmed hospitals in Singapore.
In Africa today, scholars who study penis snatching understand it mainly as an urban phenomenonan extreme expression of the anxieties that pervade a city when villagers become urbanites en masse, living among throngs of unfamiliar people. Thats because most cases have been reported in crowded spots like Lagos, in Nigeria, and Douala, in Cameroon. But here I was in Tiringouloua dusty, peanut-growing hamlet so small and poor it barely has a market. If penis snatching had previously been a city dwellers fear, now it seemed that not even the remotest places would be spared.
But spared from what, exactly?
Its fair to say there are victims on both sides of the penis-snatching equation.
Shortly after the disturbance in the Tiringoulou market, members of the armed rebel group that governs the town arrested the traveler and subjected him to a harsh interrogationfor his own protection, they told me later. Had they left him to the mob, the towns women would have torn the stranger limb from limb, they reasoned. But the protection, such as it was, did not last long: the supposed thief was executed by gunshot later that day. (Aware that international law frowns on summary execution, the rebel commander who oversaw the execution relayed a different version of events: he said the thief had mysteriously vanished from his holding cell.)
As for the men whose penises were stolen, several eyewitnesses assured me that the appendages did indeed shrink dramatically. I cant offer such an intimate eyewitness account myself, but I did visit one of the men at his home, and he clearly seemed to be suffering. He lay propped on one elbow, slack and listless in loose sweatpants, on a woven mat in the shade outside his house. A handful of friends kept him company. Over cups of sweet tea, I asked them about how they understood the recent events.
Penis snatching, they said, was a means of supplying an illicit and lucrative trade in organs. Cameroonians and Nigerianspeople from places where they have multistory buildingswere seen as particularly well versed in the business. You see how advanced Cameroon is? someone said. Its because they are so strong in commerce of all kinds, including in genitals and scalps. The stolen organs, my companions said, are sold to occult healers for use in ceremonies, or else they are quickly fenced back to victims of penis snatching for a price. But the real money was to be made in Europe. One man who had spent some time living in Cameroon said he had heard of a woman there who was nabbed by airport security while trying to smuggle several penises to the Continent inside a baguette.
I asked the town doctor what he thought. Could he help the victims? He shook his head slowlyas if trying to gauge how much I believed about the whole affairand then responded, Western medicine is no match for this magic. It is a mysterious thing.
Mysterious indeed. But perhaps no more so than certain afflictions that are less strange to us in the West. If penis stealing seems beyond-the-pale weird, consider what people in Tiringoulou might think upon hearing of Americans who starve themselves near to death because their reflection in the mirror convinces them they are fat.
Transward
Penis Snatching on the Rise -- Africas Genital-Stealing Crime Wave Hits the Countryside
All part of an illicit and lucrative trade in organs.
March 14, 2013 |
Elaborate greetings are the norm, Ive found, when one enters a Central African village. So it was a surprise when I noticed that many people werent 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 traveler passing through town on a Sudanese merchant truck had, with a simple handshake, removed two mens penises.
As best I could reconstruct from witness accounts, the stranger had stopped to purchase a cup of tea at the market. After handing over his money, he clasped the vendors hand. The tea seller felt an electric tingling course through his body and immediately sensed that his penis had shrunk to a size smaller than that of a babys. His yells quickly drew a crowd. Somehow in the fray a second man fell victim as well.
Hearing all this, I was less shocked than intrigued. As an anthropologist who studies the region, I was familiar with the problem of penis snatching. What surprised me was that the phenomenonor, depending on your perspective, the rumorhad made it as far as Tiringoulou.
Reports of genital theft have spread like an epidemic across West and Central Africa over the past two decades, in tandem with what appears to be a general resurgence of witchcraft on the continent. Anthropologists have explained this rise as a response to an increasingly mystifying and capricious global economy. Which is to say that when the workings of capital are as genuinely obscure as they are in todays Africa, proceeding behind a veil of complexity and corruption, rumors of occult economiesoften involving a trade in human organsoffer a less mystifying explanation for the radical disparities in wealth on display.
That said, genital theft is neither new nor confined to Africa. Similar panics afflicted Central Europe in the 15th and 16th centuries. (Malleus Maleficarum, a book-length jeremiad against the dangers of witchcraft from 1486, includes a discussion of sorceresses who take away male members and keep them in birds nests.) And in 1967, an outbreak of korothe belief that the penis is retracting into the bodyoverwhelmed hospitals in Singapore.
In Africa today, scholars who study penis snatching understand it mainly as an urban phenomenonan extreme expression of the anxieties that pervade a city when villagers become urbanites en masse, living among throngs of unfamiliar people. Thats because most cases have been reported in crowded spots like Lagos, in Nigeria, and Douala, in Cameroon. But here I was in Tiringouloua dusty, peanut-growing hamlet so small and poor it barely has a market. If penis snatching had previously been a city dwellers fear, now it seemed that not even the remotest places would be spared.
But spared from what, exactly?
Its fair to say there are victims on both sides of the penis-snatching equation.
Shortly after the disturbance in the Tiringoulou market, members of the armed rebel group that governs the town arrested the traveler and subjected him to a harsh interrogationfor his own protection, they told me later. Had they left him to the mob, the towns women would have torn the stranger limb from limb, they reasoned. But the protection, such as it was, did not last long: the supposed thief was executed by gunshot later that day. (Aware that international law frowns on summary execution, the rebel commander who oversaw the execution relayed a different version of events: he said the thief had mysteriously vanished from his holding cell.)
As for the men whose penises were stolen, several eyewitnesses assured me that the appendages did indeed shrink dramatically. I cant offer such an intimate eyewitness account myself, but I did visit one of the men at his home, and he clearly seemed to be suffering. He lay propped on one elbow, slack and listless in loose sweatpants, on a woven mat in the shade outside his house. A handful of friends kept him company. Over cups of sweet tea, I asked them about how they understood the recent events.
Penis snatching, they said, was a means of supplying an illicit and lucrative trade in organs. Cameroonians and Nigerianspeople from places where they have multistory buildingswere seen as particularly well versed in the business. You see how advanced Cameroon is? someone said. Its because they are so strong in commerce of all kinds, including in genitals and scalps. The stolen organs, my companions said, are sold to occult healers for use in ceremonies, or else they are quickly fenced back to victims of penis snatching for a price. But the real money was to be made in Europe. One man who had spent some time living in Cameroon said he had heard of a woman there who was nabbed by airport security while trying to smuggle several penises to the Continent inside a baguette.
I asked the town doctor what he thought. Could he help the victims? He shook his head slowlyas if trying to gauge how much I believed about the whole affairand then responded, Western medicine is no match for this magic. It is a mysterious thing.
Mysterious indeed. But perhaps no more so than certain afflictions that are less strange to us in the West. If penis stealing seems beyond-the-pale weird, consider what people in Tiringoulou might think upon hearing of Americans who starve themselves near to death because their reflection in the mirror convinces them they are fat.
Transward