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.
By Joe Bavier (Reuters.com)
(Editing by Nick Tattersall and Mary Gabriel)
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