Last Friday, the Federal Capital Territory Commissioner of Police, Haruna Garba, while intimating newsmen about the epidemic of “stolen manhoods” in the nation’s capital and adjoining towns, noted that about 62 cases have been reported since September 21. Of this figure, Garuba said 51 were false. The “suspects” who raised the alarm have been charged to court for “giving false information and inciting public disturbance.” I am genuinely curious about two things: first, the eleven cases remaining and, second, how the police ascertained those lying.
A ready answer would be that those men were checked by competent medical personnel and found “intact.” If they were truly lying, what would they have gained from inciting the public and subjecting some poor innocent victim(s) to potential mob justice? That is a question I am sincerely invested in getting answered. What if these men’s claims, though not factual, also carried no intent to deceive? What if they claimed their penises were stolen because they were struck by a psychosomatic condition?
There are two sets of responses I have seen to this phenomenon of missing penises. On one side are the believers, people who take every instance of alleged occult or supernatural occurrence at face value. Every story about money ritual, spirits and ghosts, shape-shifters, demonic agents, is to be believed and defended as a manifestation of “African Science.” These are the ones who boast that Babalawos in villages without potable water or electricity can suspend natural realities. To challenge their thinking is to give yourself away as an inauthentic African suffering bouts of colomentality and cannot acknowledge that Africans have indigenous ways of knowing that which supersedes modern science.
The other set is the sceptics who dismiss these stories outright as impossible. Sometimes, they would superciliously berate the primitivity of African minds that will not let go of stupid village tales and embrace the logicality of “science.” It seems to me that the police fall into this second category. The series of warnings they have issued about “false alarms” suggest they are taking the rationalist position. But what if the sceptics’ position is just as unfounded as that of the believers?
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What we call the “stolen manhood” phenomenon is neither new nor even “African.” Penis panics have been recorded in various forms of literature for centuries. Now diagnosed as “Koro,” the condition describes a state of anxiety where a man believes his penis is shrinking, retracting, or disappearing altogether and that he would consequently die. While medical studies have their own term, the society where it happens has always found some abstract or material factor to blame. In Central Europe in the 15th and 16th centuries, it was attributed to witches. In Singapore in 1967, they blamed the phenomenon on pork poisoning. The price of pork fell drastically, and the hysteria only died down after public officials campaigned that the cases of disappearing penises were a psychological issue. In China in the 1980s, they blamed theirs on the “fox spirits” migrating from place to place. Those spirits were believed to possess beautiful women, and some were consequently killed. The men in the communities it happened were so consumed with fear of losing their penises that they walked around with various contraptions attached to keep them from disappearing.
In Africa, cases have been recorded in Nigeria, Ghana, Benin, Congo Republic, Central African Republic, and Cameroon. Across time and space, the various documented cases have a certain consistency that suggests that the bodies of those men truly experienced something that their minds translated into being robbed of their genitals. Medical literature says that the retraction these men felt could be reversed in hours or even days. So, if someone is taken to the hospital after they have raised the alarm and their penises are found to be functional, it does not mean they lied initially.
In a place like Nigeria where belief in the occult is rife, such accusations are not to be taken lightly. In public places where the alarm is raised, there is always an ignorant bloodthirsty mob waiting to unleash violence. In 2001, at least 12 cases of lynching over stolen penises in the South-West were reported. Between Nollywood and religious houses, people have been so fed an idea of evil that they imagine that some forms of evil can be destroyed for good.
These people only need to hear a man accuse another of stealing his penis, and they would transmute into beasts to launch judgment. Such alarms—and the violence that inevitably follows—are almost always a male affair. While there are a few documented cases of women who have claimed their breasts were missing, Koro is more popularly documented in men. That peculiarity partly has to do with the male anatomy where the penis is an offshoot and partly with social construction of manhood.
Anthropologists have found that the phenomenon of stolen penises correlates with economic stress and social anxiety that keep men from evolving through demarcated social stages. The penis is a biological and physical symbol of what we designate as the becoming of a man: physical and emotional maturity, procreation, and even economic independence. It is the one thing that separates men from women, and that is why the male fears of feminisation—of not being man enough—revolve around that part of their body.
The anxieties of not measuring up to social standards of manhood define men throughout their lives. There is a joke that men will swallow just about any potion that promises to increase their virility. It is funny because it is true. There is a reason urban centres in Nigeria are replete with all kinds of concoctions brewed by “native doctors” promising to make a sex machine out of insecure men.
Today’s Nigeria has enough stress to rob a man of manhood. That is why looking inside the men’s underpants to determine whether they still have their penis or not produced such an inadequate result. If 51 out of 62 cases examined turned out to be “false alarms,” the police should be curious if their meter for adjudging these issues is not falsely calibrated.
Nigeria faces a protracted economic crisis and social upheaval that trigger angst in people every day. Whenever you thought things could not get worse, it does just that. There is no sense of social progress, and many Nigerians are justifiably angry, desperate, and frustrated. Walk on the streets these days, and you practically feel the tension exuding from people and making them restless.
Now and then, a person launches into an outburst about being robbed of the very biological instrument they need to assert their personhood and a crowd of men for whom the cultural neurosis resonates jump out of their idling spaces to enact an extreme violence they hope would assuage their deficiencies and reassure them they can still do the things men are supposed to do—be a defender. What that momentary feeling of rage gives them is a feeling of control. In that one moment, they presume they have identified a source of the evil robbing them of vital life sources. Destroying it is cathartic.
While I understand why the police cannot afford to brook “superstition,” I also think they should be open to understanding cultural psychology. Those men—I do not know how many of the 62—raised the alarm because they had a physiological disorder fed by sociological conditions. Treating them as liars does nothing to educate a society that believes a penis can be stolen, and the supposed thief can be apprehended and punished. At best, the police are merely reactive. It would be more productive if they embarked on public education to preempt manifestations of Koro in public places and the violence that typically follows.
Abimbola Adelakun
