The only thing more bizarre than reality is what the mind perceives as real. That certainly seems to be the case in the penis-shrinking scare that hit West Africa recently. Last January, a dozen people in Ghana were beaten to death by mobs who accused them of making their penises shrink or vanish through witchcraft. The victims claimed their penises had shrunk or vanished after being touched by, or shaking hands with, a sorcerer. The sorcerers had demanded money in return for a cure. But according to news reports, the police later examined all of the alleged victims and found their genitals intact.
By March, the penis-shrinking scare had spread to the neighboring Ivory Coast. Over a period of four days, seven men accused of being penis-shrinking sorcerers were beaten to death in separate incidents in Abidjan, the capital. The Ivory Coast's interior minister appeared on television and made an appeal for calm, insisting that the problem existed only in the minds of the "victims." The police in the Ivory Coast and Ghana have dismissed the events as a ploy by thieves seeking to rob people in the frightened mobs.
"What we seem to have in the Ivory Coast," continues Franzini, "is the addition of criminal activity. The sorcerers attempt to take advantage of these men by allegedly inflicting them with the frightening prospect of losing their penises and then asking for a ransom/fee/bribe to restore the member or to prevent its disappearance. Of course, for their extortion efforts the sorcerers place themselves at great risk -- being stoned, beaten, or burned to death!
"Koro begins as a cultural phenomenon," says Franzini, "becomes medicalized as a mental illness, then becomes criminalized by exploitive sorcerers. This ultimately has political implications for the national government, which wants to present an image of stability to lure economic investment. The survival of whole countries can be at stake."
-- Patrick Huyghe
This phenomenon -- fear of a disappearing penis -- is known to psychologists as koro. "It is not a new disorder," notes Louis Franzini, a psychologist at San Diego State University and co-author (with John Grossberg) of Eccentric & Bizarre Behaviors (John Wiley and Sons, 1995), a book about koro and other strange disorders. "For many years it was incorrectly thought to be confined to men of Southeast Asia. There were epidemics of koro in Singapore in July 1967, in Thailand in November 1976, and in West Bengal, India in July 1982. Such 'epidemics' confirm that what we have here is an anxiety-based delusion readily modeled and communicated among vulnerable men.
Tourists may not know that Ivory Coast has a dark side.