‘Witch stole man's penis.’ ‘Benin alert over “penis theft” panic.’ ‘Seven killed in Ghana over “penis-snatching” episodes.’ Headlines such as these semaphore a recurring fear and an enduring phenomenon in West Africa, and no doubt other parts of the continent – that of the magical disappearance of the male organ as a result of contact with someone, generally a stranger, through the use of the occult. As the articles variously report: ‘Purported victims often blame penis shrinkage on handshakes with sorcerers’ (CNN); ‘It is widely believed in Nigeria that witches have the power to steal men's sexual organs by an incantation or a handshake’ (Ananova). Often the accusation of penis-stealing is taken up by a crowd and escalates into mass hysteria, culminating in violence and death. The BBC attributes this extreme reaction to ‘superstition and illiteracy’, while CNN refers to a medical doctor who has ‘linked the phenomenon to fear’.

It is evident from the tone of the reporting and the fact that one website, Ananova, transplanted the story from its original source to a section called ‘Quirkies’, featuring ‘eccentrics’, ‘quirky gaffes’, ‘strange crime’ and ‘sex life’, that such stories feed into western scepticism about African occult practices and reinforce stereotypes of primitivism, credulity and backwardness. Recent insights from cultural anthropology (the Comaroffs; Geschiere; van Binsbergen) offer another way of reading narratives of penis loss and their relationship to witchcraft, suggesting that, far from re-establishing the primitive, they are living symptoms of modernity itself, and not only in Africa.