Kasoa, a small town in Ghana, has recently been in the news for strange happenings. The story is that some juju men in the town have been using juju to steal people’s penises for money rituals.
The first of these bizarre situations is reported to have happened on the 18th day of March 2024 when one Yusif, a tricycle rider, accused a local shoemaker in Kasoa town of stealing his penis, shortly after having a handshake with the shoemaker. This incident drew the attention of an angry mob who descended on the poor shoemaker and almost lynched him, if not for the timely intervention of the police.
Much like an outbreak of an epidemic disease, the menace of disappearing penis spread like wildfire over different parts of Kasoa town following the first reported case involving the shoemaker, with more than 6 other cases of similar allegations of disappearing penises reported in the town within a space of two weeks.
But Kasoa isn’t the first town in Ghana to be hit by this epidemic of penis theft neither is Kasoa’s case the first time the phenomenon would be heard of in Ghana. As far back as the year 1997, CNN reported the gruesome murder of seven sorcerers who were accused of penis theft by angry mobs in Accra, the capital of Ghana.
Apart from Ghana, other African countries like Nigeria, Benin Republic, Democratic Republic of Congo, Central African Republic, Cameroon, etc. have, at different points in history, had their fair share of this fear-stocking story of men losing their genitals after having physical contact with strangers. The ugly trend has existed for so long in countries like Ghana and Nigeria that it is now considered a myth as many people now live in palpable fear of their penises being stolen someday by some penis-thieving-juju men.
Recently, there has been a surge in number of reported cases of disappearing penises across Africa. Only six months ago, the Nigeria Police Command at the Federal Capital Territory Abuja announced that it received over 60 complaints involving allegations of penis theft.
The question however is, how true are these allegations of stolen penises? Is it possible for one man armed with juju to use some abracadabra and snatch another’s penis just by having body contact with the latter?
Answering the above question, some empiricists – medical and psychological experts – have come up with the name “koro” which they say is the psychological disorder responsible for the shrinking or disappearance of the penis. Proposing this psychological explanation to the phenomenon of disappearing penises, Ninyo Omidiji, a medical doctor with the Benue State University Teaching Hospital, in an interview with Saturday PUNCH in 2020 stated as follows:
“Koro syndrome is characterised by a person’s acute anxiety attacks due to their overwhelming belief that their sex organs are retracting and disappearing into their body and that this retraction is fatal, despite the lack of actual physical changes to these organs.”
To Doctor Ninyo and his co-believers of the Koro syndrome theory like Dr Agbor Ebuta (an Abuja-based family health consultant), the victims of penis disappearance are people who have underlying mental health issues like depression, anxiety, depression, schizophrenia, etc. which cause them to occasionally assume that their penis has disappeared when in actual truth their penis is still intact even though it may have shrunk in size as a result of the acute anxiety attack.
As to the claims that some of the victims of penis theft recovered their penises after confronting the juju men who stole them and compelling them to restore same, the Koro syndrome proponents argue that what happens is that as soon as the acute anxiety attack abates, the patient recovers his senses and realizes that his penis is still intact or that it merely shrunk as opposed to his earlier supposition that it has vanished.
I find the Koro syndrome theory a bit less convincing. I consider it as one of those overzealous scientific explanations for non-scientific things. I am not saying that there is nothing like an acute anxiety attack or that it is not possible for a man’s penis to shrink due to the Koro syndrome (I am not a scientist and so, I lack the locus standi to make such claims). I am only saying that the Koro syndrome theory hasn’t satisfactorily explained away this phenomenon of disappearing penis in Africa.
I mean, how do we successfully prove that a full-grown man can think for a moment that his penis has disappeared and to still believe so even after pulling off his trousers to peep at his crotch or to delve his hand into the groin region to confirm if the phallus is still there or not? Even if we are to assume that the affected man is out of his mind as a result of the effect of the Koro syndrome, how about the crowd of people who usually run to the scene upon hearing the victim’s outcry? Does it mean none of those persons who usually come to the rescue of the victim bothers to check if indeed the victim’s penis has disappeared before taking on the suspected penis thief?
The point is, that metaphysical things like African juju cannot conveniently be explained in scientific terms. Scientists can try as much as they can to scientifically rationalize everything but phenomena like juju would never be properly situated in those Sigmund Freudian theories. And so, when a week ago, the head of the Municipal Security in charge of Kasoa town came out to dismiss the stories of missing penises in Kasoa as being untrue as according to her, there hasn’t been any medical evidence to corroborate such claims, she was only speaking in scientific terms. She was simply saying that superstitious things like juju are not things that the police can undertake an empirical investigation on.
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The fact that juju cannot be empirically proved doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist or that a juju practitioner can’t manipulate nature by invocation of juju. This is why even though juju is largely unrecognized in law, we still find in some countries laws made to criminalize the use of juju. For example, under section 210 of the Nigerian Criminal Code, it is an offence punishable with two years imprisonment for any person to make, sell, use or have in his possession any juju, drug or charm which is intended to be used or reported to possess the power to manipulate others or which is alleged or reported to possess the power of causing any natural phenomenon or any disease or epidemic.
The prohibition of the use of juju to harm others in countries like Nigeria goes to show that, in as much as we may not accept to work with any allegation that is based on superstitious beliefs like juju, we cannot, as a people, considering our history and our inclination to spirituality, disclaim the existence of juju. And this is not just for those who believe in African spirituality; it is also for those die-hard woke Africans who, as a result of Western education, feel ashamed identifying with African superstitions or conceding that they exist.
Unfortunately for our woke African brothers, the menace of penis theft cannot be ignored. This is because it is not only those who believe that their genitals can be snatched by juju who are scared of the recent spree of the phenomenon. Even those of us who laugh off such stories of stolen penises as being delusional still worry about the possibility of being wrongly accused someday of stealing someone’s penis and getting beaten up or lynched by an angry mob.
And so, until we stop dismissing these stories of stolen penis as being delusional and quit accusing those who believe in them of mass hysteria, we may never get to the root of the problem and the consequence will be the recurrence of this menace which has existed in Africa for over three decades now.
