Earlier this month, the BBC ran a story on the problem of so-called “genital theft” manifesting across Africa. This truly is a social panic exclusive to Black Africans, as I’ve never heard of Haitians or Black Brazilians descending into such superstitious paranoia (in spite of some history of voodoo). More than 80 people have been killed across six countries over a nine-month period, but the problem is actual far greater, because at least 26 African countries have experienced outbreaks.
The BBC (often lampooned for sharing its initialism with something pornographic) describes how a simple tap on the shoulder or hand-shake can cause men to believe that their genitals have disappeared or been shrunk, following which the perceived victim then proceeds to rouse a mob to seek violent vigilante justice. One of the profiled victims, Tanzanian mechanic Boniface Mgala, was beaten to within an inch of his life after going out of town for a job with a friend and getting ambushed while in a restaurant. He now suffers chronic headaches, can no longer work, and, to add insult to injury, he is the one who is now limp (well, the insensitive BBC used that description for his gait).
Back in 2008, “genital theft” was mostly confined to Congo and Ghana, as this Reuters article reports. So why is it getting worse? Social media is to blame (just when you thought access to modern tech might help the underprivileged). I briefly discussed the issue in my book under the term “penis snatching” - a label which seems to have deflated in popularity among news editors.
In another section of my book, which later got edited out, I actually mentioned another psychosomatic phenomenon that existed among Australian Aboriginals: bone-pointing. This act was considered to be a kiss of death, and because people believed it, it usually worked. As late as the 1980s, an Aboriginal man died an excruciating death in a hospital in Darwin because he believed he was the recipient of such a bone cast hex. Doctors confirmed that there was nothing physically wrong with him.
Now, having said that, are people in more developed countries immune from such collective psychoses? Of course not, but it’s a large difference of degree. In South-East Asia, there have been outbreaks of koro, which is the paranoid belief that the genitals are retracting into the body. China had multiple epidemics, including a big wave in 1985, Singapore had hundreds of cases in 1967, Thailand in 1976, India had many epidemics in its Eastern states, Malaysia and Indonesia were also gonad no-go-zones at some point. But the key difference with koro is that it isn’t connected with black magic spells, touching or mob violence.
As for Whites and other less primitive cultures, psychosomatic illness can certainly manifest, but it works through the prism of extreme authority and sophisticated apparatuses. The best example is when people are given a diagnosis of a terminal illness like cancer from a medical professional. Their condition often rapidly deteriorates because they believe that they’re done for. But diagnoses aren’t always correct, and many people can recover from cancer if they change their diet/environment and have hope in a recovery. The placebo effect, as with the nocebo effect, are well attested in science.
I’ll conclude with a somewhat relevant story from last week, the death of Nigerian-British businessman/influencer Igho “Tiny” Ubiribo. A coroner ruled that his death was from a hyaluronic acid injection that he received while getting a penis enlargement (his fifth) in Bangkok (no really). His son has been left to defend his father’s honor (and indirectly his own)—claiming that Igho did not have a micropenis. In other words, he died in vain and because he was vain. And that is the general summation one can make when it comes to Blacks and this aspect of masculinity—whether it’s pointing the bone or stealing the boner, they’re a-head of the rest.
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P.S. In the linked BBC article for the main news item, readers might be amused to see that the author Mungai Ngige is part of the “BBC Global Disinformation Unit”—yet another ambiguous appellation from the geniuses at the beeb. Sometimes one wonders whether it’s incompetence or schadenfreude. It’s Orwellian in either case…
