On second thought, we’ll call this one “Dickless in Gaza.” Or maybe “Acockalypse Now.” Heh.
Academics observing reports of penis snatching on the [African] continent have previously deemed it an urban phenomenon — a manifestation of the anxieties that arise when a village becomes a city and rural people find themselves living among crowds of unfamiliar people. So a U.S. anthropologist was ‘intrigued’ when she arrived in the tiny hamlet of Tiringoulou in the Central African Republic, to find two villagers claiming to have been the victims of genital theft. Previous instances have been reported in crowded centers like Lagos, Nigeria, or Douala, in Cameroon.
Louisa Lombard, a postdoctoral fellow in geography at the University of California, Berkeley, said villagers in Tiringoulou told her of a traveller [who], upon arriving on a Sudanese merchant truck, removed two men’s penises with a handshake. The academic was told the stranger had targeted a tea seller in the market and a second man. … “After handing over his money, he [the stranger] 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.”
Several eyewitnesses assured her the “appendages did indeed shrink dramatically.”
Ms Lombard described victims “on both sides” of the phenomenon, which she [said] was linked to a “general resurgence of witchcraft” in Africa. Having visited one of the so-called victims and finding that he “clearly seemed to be suffering” as he lay listless in the shade at his home, the academic was later told that the alleged penis snatcher had been executed by gunshot by members of the armed rebel group that governs Tiringoulou.