Penis Snatching on the Rise in Africa

Africa’s Genital-Stealing Crime Wave Hits the Countryside - All part of an illicit and lucrative trade in organs. 
By Louisa Lombard | Pacific Standard 

March 14, 2013 | Elaborate greetings are the norm, I’ve found, when one enters a Central African village. So it was a surprise when I noticed that many people weren’t shaking hands the morning I arrived in Tiringoulou, a town of about 2,000 people in one of the remotest corners of the Central African Republic, in March 2010. I soon found out the reason: the day before, a traveler passing through town on a Sudanese merchant truck had, with a simple handshake, removed two men’s penises.

As best I could reconstruct from witness accounts, the stranger had stopped to purchase a cup of tea at the market. After handing over his money, he clasped the vendor’s hand. The tea seller felt an electric tingling course through his body and immediately sensed that his penis had shrunk to a size smaller than that of a baby’s. His yells quickly drew a crowd. Somehow in the fray a second man fell victim as well.

Hearing all this, I was less shocked than intrigued. As an anthropologist who studies the region, I was familiar with the problem of penis snatching. What surprised me was that the phenomenon—or, depending on your perspective, the rumor—had made it as far as Tiringoulou.

Reports of genital theft have spread like an epidemic across West and Central Africa over the past two decades, in tandem with what appears to be a general resurgence of witchcraft on the continent. Anthropologists have explained this rise as a response to an increasingly mystifying and capricious global economy. Which is to say that when the workings of capital are as genuinely obscure as they are in today’s Africa, proceeding behind a veil of complexity and corruption, rumors of “occult economies”—often involving a trade in human organs—offer a less mystifying explanation for the radical disparities in wealth on display.

That said, genital theft is neither new nor confined to Africa. Similar panics afflicted Central Europe in the 15th and 16th centuries. (Malleus Maleficarum  a book-length jeremiad against the dangers of witchcraft from 1486, includes a discussion of sorceresses who “take away male members” and keep them in birds’ nests.) And in 1967, an outbreak of koro—the belief that the penis is retracting into the body—overwhelmed hospitals in Singapore.

In Africa today, scholars who study penis snatching understand it mainly as an urban phenomenon—an extreme expression of the anxieties that pervade a city when villagers become urbanites en masse, living among throngs of unfamiliar people. That’s because most cases have been reported in crowded spots like Lagos, in Nigeria, and Douala, in Cameroon. But here I was in Tiringoulou—a dusty, peanut-growing hamlet so small and poor it barely has a market. If penis snatching had previously been a city dweller’s fear, now it seemed that not even the remotest places would be spared.

But spared from what, exactly?

It’s fair to say there are victims on both sides of the penis-snatching equation.

Shortly after the disturbance in the Tiringoulou market, members of the armed rebel group that governs the town arrested the traveler and subjected him to a harsh interrogation—for his own protection, they told me later. Had they left him to the mob, the town’s women would have torn the stranger limb from limb, they reasoned. But the protection, such as it was, did not last long: the supposed thief was executed by gunshot later that day. (Aware that international law frowns on summary execution, the rebel commander who oversaw the execution relayed a different version of events: he said the thief had mysteriously vanished from his holding cell.)

As for the men whose penises were stolen, several eyewitnesses assured me that the appendages did indeed shrink dramatically. I can’t offer such an intimate eyewitness account myself, but I did visit one of the men at his home, and he clearly seemed to be suffering. He lay propped on one elbow, slack and listless in loose sweatpants, on a woven mat in the shade outside his house. A handful of friends kept him company. Over cups of sweet tea, I asked them about how they understood the recent events.

Penis snatching, they said, was a means of supplying an illicit and lucrative trade in organs. Cameroonians and Nigerians—people from places “where they have multistory buildings”—were seen as particularly well versed in the business. “You see how advanced Cameroon is?” someone said. “It’s because they are so strong in commerce of all kinds, including in genitals and scalps.” The stolen organs, my companions said, are sold to occult healers for use in ceremonies, or else they are quickly fenced back to victims of penis snatching for a price. But the real money was to be made in Europe. One man who had spent some time living in Cameroon said he had heard of a woman there who was nabbed by airport security while trying to smuggle several penises to the Continent inside a baguette.

I asked the town doctor what he thought. Could he help the victims? He shook his head slowly—as if trying to gauge how much I believed about the whole affair—and then responded, “Western medicine is no match for this magic. It is a mysterious thing.”

Mysterious indeed. But perhaps no more so than certain afflictions that are less strange to us in the West. If penis stealing seems beyond-the-pale weird, consider what people in Tiringoulou might think upon hearing of Americans who starve themselves near to death because their reflection in the mirror convinces them they are fat. 

Lies You’ve Been Told About the Pacific Garbage Patch

By Annalee Newitz
May 21, 2012 - io9

You've probably heard of the "Pacific garbage patch," also called the "trash vortex." It's a region of the North Pacific ocean where the northern jet stream and the southern trade winds, moving opposite directions, create a vast, gently circling region of water called the North Pacific Gyre — and at its center, there are tons of plastic garbage. You may even have seen this picture of the garbage patch, above — right? Wrong.

That image, widely mislabeled as a shot of the Pacific garbage patch, is actually from Manila harbor. And it's just one of many misconceptions the public has about what's really happening to plastics in the ocean. We talked with Scripps Institution marine biologist Miriam Goldstein, who has just completed a study of how plastic is changing the ecosystem in the North Pacific Gyre, about myths and realities of the Pacific garbage patch.

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"That picture of the guy in the canoe has been following me around my whole career!" Goldstein laughed when I brought it up. "I think it's an example of media telephone, where somebody wanted something dramatic to illustrate their story — and then through the magic of the internet, the picture got mislabeled." Goldstein has gone on several research trips to the garbage patch, 1,000 miles off the coast of California, and has even swum in it. "We have never seen anything like that picture," she asserted. "I've never seen it personally, and we've never seen it on satellite."

MYTH: There is a giant island of solid garbage floating in the Pacific.
FACT: There are millions of small and microscopic pieces of plastic, about .4 pieces per cubic meter, floating over a roughly 2736 square km area of the Pacific. This amount has increased significantly over the past 40 years.

In reality, Goldstein said, most pieces of garbage in the Pacific are "about the size of your pinkie fingernail." Though she and her team have found some larger pieces of plastic, like buoys and tires, most are microscopic. What's alarming about them isn't their size, but the sheer amount of plastic. To figure out how much there really is, she and her team have trawled the surface of the ocean in random locations over a 2736 square km region in the gyre. Once a day, they drag a very fine, specialized net behind the boat. On one such sampling trip, she and her team found plastic pieces in 117 out of 119 random samples. On another, they found plastic in all 28 samples they took.

This is a video of Goldstein in 2010, talking about some of the group's earlier research trips to collect samples from the surface of the ocean in the North Pacific Gyre.

Since the 1970s, scientists have been using the same sampling methods — and the same kinds of trawling nets, invented by oceanographer Lanna Cheng — to measure the amount of plastic in the ocean. So Goldstein and her colleagues are able to make historical comparisons, and measure increases in plastic density. In a recent paper, they write, "Microplastic debris in the North Pacific increased by two orders of magnitude between 1972–1987 and 1999–2010 in both numerical and mass concentrations."

MYTH: All this plastic is killing animals.
FACT: Some animals are being harmed, but others are thriving. Here's why that could be a problem.

Nobody who studies ocean ecosystems would ever argue that this plastic isn't harmful. But many documentaries and articles about the garbage patch make it seem as if the main problem is that the garbage is killing animals. Birds and fish mistake the plastic for food, eat it, and then slowly starve to death. Goldstein points out that there is clear evidence that both birds and fish are eating the plastic, but it's very hard to draw conclusions about whether eating it is killing them. Generally, scientists are only able to examine the stomachs of animals who are already dead. "Some studies of albatrosses show plastic correlating with poor nutrition — and you do see a lot of dead chicks with their stomachs absolutely stuffed with plastic," Goldstein explained. The problem is that we don't know whether there are also birds who eat the plastic and survive. "We're not going to go around killing baby albatrosses to examine their stomach contents," she added.

This is an even more difficult issue when it comes to fish, since she and many other researchers have found living fish with plastic in their stomachs. It's not clear whether these fish are suffering malnutrition, or are unharmed by eating plastic because they can just pass it out in their excrement. Fish digestive systems are a lot different from those of birds, so it's possible that what's harmful to the albatrosses isn't affecting the fish as much.

And finally, there is a class of creatures who are actually thriving as a result of the plastic influx. These are water skater insects, small crabs, barnacles, and invertebrates called bryozoans, who live on hard surfaces in the water. Some of them, like the barnacles and bryozoans, can do a lot of damage to ship hulls and have caused harm in other ecosystems they've invaded. Usually, these creatures lead a hardscrabble life, barely making it in the deep ocean where hard surfaces are limited to, as Goldstein put it, "the odd floating tree trunk, rare shells, feathers, or pieces of pumice." But now, with all the plastic floating around, these once-rare creatures are enjoying a boom time.

In her recent paper, Goldstein and her colleagues offer persuasive evidence that water skaters are laying their eggs on pieces of plastic in much greater numbers than ever before. Does this mean a glut of water skaters? Not necessarily. Their eggs are large and yellow, which means they stand out in a world of clear blue water. Possibly what's happening is that all these eggs are easy prey for fish and crabs who eat them. No matter what's happening to these eggs, we're going to see an imbalance in this ecosystem, where suddenly a lot more water skaters or crabs are competing with the locals for more food.

MYTH: The plastisphere is killing the ocean.
FACT: The plastisphere is an ecosystem out of balance.

The "plastisphere" is a term coined by marine biologist Erik Zettler to describe the creatures — like water skaters — who thrive in an environment with hard surfaces in the water. They are similar to creatures who cling to piers or the hulls of ships. Before human-made hard surfaces were everywhere, they would have lived on rocks or flotsam. The problem with the plastisphere is that it's radically changing the balance of a deep sea ecosystem that was once mostly just fish.

"One thing that people worry about is that hard surfaces can transport invasive species," Goldstein said. "Some animals are good at hitching a ride and they can be destructive. By adding big chunks of plastic these species can move around better, and could be introduced to places like the Northwest Pacific Islands, where there are some of the best coral reefs in the world." In other words, the plastisphere isn't destroying the ocean ecosystem — the creatures who ride on the plastic are. We're witnessing an ecosystem that is slowly falling off balance.
For now, the deep ocean is still mostly inhabited by lantern fish. "There's one lantern fish for every cubic meter of ocean," Goldstein explained, noting that these fish are probably more common than the pieces of plastic her team has sampled. But if trends continue, we're going to see more plastic than fish. And with that plastic will come more invasive species, more water skaters, and more creatures to eat the water skaters' eggs. The danger is that this could alter the deep ocean forever — and destroy all the native life there that has kept the oceans healthy for thousands of years.

Read Goldstein, et. al.'s paper about water skaters in Biology Letters.

New GOP oversight report on spill pushes ‘urban myth’

Maritime law expert: 'Totally not true' that Jones Act has blocked Gulf help By Ron Brynaert
Thursday, July 1st, 2010
A GOP House oversight report regarding the Gulf oil spill set to be released soon contains a talking point which experts are calling "totally not true" and an "urban myth."

"The White House is not being forthcoming on what is actually happening with the Gulf oil spill response, and the effort to show that the administration is doing everything possible actually gets in the way, a report being released by the ranking Republican on the House Oversight Committee says," Michael McAulif reports for the New York Daily News.

In excerpts released early, Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) argues that many of the assets that are supposed to be in place really are not; that the chain of command is confused, at best; that efforts to quiet criticism hinder the response; that foreign assets remain unused, and the planning has been inadequate for the hurricane season.

Issa, who has become one of the administration’s thorniest critics, had this to say: “This report reveals a stark contrast between the narrative being told by the Administration in Washington and the sobering realities and challenges that the people closest to this catastrophe are struggling to overcome. These testimonials from the people who are on the frontlines of this crisis have brought to light a bureaucratic quagmire that is exacerbating the response and clean-up effort - in a post-Katrina world, this is unimaginable and unacceptable. The evidence on the ground suggests that the White House has been more focused on the public relations of this crisis than with providing local officials the resources they need to deal with it.”

The White House will certainly disagree, and you have to take a report released by one party with a grain of salt. But there are at least claims here worth following up, and we suspect the rest of the Oversight Committee will be interested in doing so.

The last excerpt from Issa's report claims, "According to local officials, the decision to not waive the Jones Act has impaired Gulf Coast clean-up efforts. The most likely application of a broad-based Jones Act waiver would be for the operation of boats equipped with skimmers, which is one of the most effective tools to clean up the oil. Rear Admiral Jim Watson conceded in a briefing to Chairman Towns and Ranking Member Issa that the Coast Guard does not currently have access to a sufficient numbers of skimmers."

However, McClatchy Newspapers' William Douglas reports, "Maritime law experts, government officials and independent researchers say that the claim is false. The Jones Act isn't an impediment at all, they say, and it hasn't blocked anything."

"Totally not true," said Mark Ruge, counsel to the Maritime Cabotage Task Force, a coalition of U.S. shipbuilders, operators and labor unions. "It is simply an urban myth that the Jones Act is the problem."

In a news briefing last week, Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen said he'd received "no requests for Jones Act waivers" from foreign vessels or countries. "If the vessels are operating outside state waters, which is three miles and beyond, they don't require a waiver," he said.
....
FactCheck.org, a nonprofit website operated by the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg Public Policy Center, analyzed claims that failure to waive the Jones Act is blocking foreign-flagged vessels from assisting in the Gulf. It concluded last week that "In reality, the Jones Act has yet to be an issue in the response efforts."

The Deepwater Horizon response team reported in a news release June 15 that 15 foreign-flagged ships were participating in the oil spill cleanup, FactCheck.org said. "None of them needed a waiver because the Jones Act does not apply," it said.

"Some Democrats and union officials say that Republicans are trying to use the Gulf spill to kill what conservatives consider a protectionist law that hurts businesses," Douglas adds. More at McClatchy.

"The best course of action is to permanently repeal the Jones Act in order to boost the economy, saving consumers hundreds of millions of dollars," McCain said last week, while introducing a bill to repeal the Jones Act.. "I hope my colleagues will join me in this effort to repeal this unnecessary, antiquated legislation in order to spur job creation and promote free trade."

Juliet Eilperin blogging for The Washington Post adds, "But administration officials have denied that the Jones Act has impeded foreign aid. In several instances, resistance from either oil giant BP or Louisiana officials has blocked the acceptance of such offers. Louisiana officials have specifically rejected the idea of hiring Dutch companies, who are more efficient than U.S. ones, to dredge sand berms off the state's coast."

The Washington Post reported last month

A plan by Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal (R) to create sand berms to keep oil from reaching the coastline originally came from the marine contractor Van Oord and the research institute Deltares, both in the Netherlands. BP pledged $360 million for the plan, but U.S. dredging companies -- which have less than one-fifth of the capacity of Dutch dredging firms -- have objected to foreign companies' participation. 

Garret Graves, who chairs Louisiana's Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority, wrote in an e-mail that state officials "have made it clear to our contractors from the beginning that we want to use American dredges to complete this sand berm as quickly as possible . . . Ultimately, any effort to expedite these berms will be fully considered, but we remain committed to our American companies." 

In the meantime, governments around the world are mobilizing help. In addition to boom, Canada has dispatched an aircraft for surveillance flights as well as several technical experts. Japan is still offering to send boom; the Swedish Coast Guard said it can send three ships that can each collect 370 barrels of oil an hour, but it is waiting to hear from the U.S. government or BP.