Rumors of penis theft began circulating last week in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo's sprawling capital of some 8 million inhabitants. They quickly dominated radio call-in shows, with listeners advised to beware of fellow passengers in communal taxis wearing gold rings.
Purported victims, 14 of whom were also detained by police, claimed that sorcerers simply touched them to make their genitals shrink or disappear, in what some residents said was an attempt to extort cash with the promise of a cure.
"You just have to be accused of that, and people come after you. We've had a number of attempted lynchings. ... You see them covered in marks after being beaten," Kinshasa's police chief, Jean-Dieudonne Oleko, told Reuters on Tuesday.
Police arrested the accused sorcerers and their victims in an effort to avoid the sort of bloodshed seen in Ghana a decade ago, when 12 suspected penis snatchers were beaten to death by angry mobs. The 27 men have since been released.
You can read more here.
Some questions:
-If you were a missionary to these people how would you go about combatting such things as this (and the motives behind them), or is that even what you should be spending time on?
-Why do you think human body parts are used in witchcraft?
-Why do you think what sounds foolish to us, is taken very seriously by them?
-Do you think their are things that we hold dear that would be considered foolish by others in the world? Is there a difference?
1 comment:
Clouds sure are pretty today.
Ladeeda.
Hmmmhmmm....
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