"How do you respond to the allegations that you are shrinking men's penises all over the world?"
Posted on 04/23/2008 9:41:14 AM PDT by skyman
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.
Thats a new one.
Blame your shortcoming on a sorcerer.
Thank goodness you can grow a penis on the back of a mouse these days!
Yeah, let’s spend American tax dollars to feed these clowns...
All cultures are equal, but not all penises are.
Understand that democratic leadership doesn’t care whether this spreads to U.S. or not...they have nothing to fear.
you realize that the UN cares more about Congo than Afghanistan or Iraq? And so does the democrat party, for the most part.
Thank God we don’t have penis-snatching sorcerers in Afghanistan or the UN would have to send in troops - with guns - to help establish peace and security. (I wonder if they have radio talk shows in Kabul that I could call into to start the rumors).
"How do you respond to the allegations that you are shrinking men's penises all over the world?"
From my cold dead hands....
Tell them to just stay out of the cold water and all will be well.
Well said Phallus. Er, pallis.
Well said Phallus. Er, pallis.
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