Online Reporter
NAIROBI. – More than 80 people were killed between October last year and July this year following false accusations about what is termed “GENITAL THEFT”, the BBC Global Disinformation Unit has found.
The unit gathered data from police forces across six African countries. The killings are linked to rumours that a simple tap on the shoulder can cause a man’s genitals to shrink or disappear.
They are being fuelled by widespread misinformation on social media.
“They were shouting that we had stolen someone’s genitals and we didn’t have any way to escape because there was a huge crowd,” Tanzanian mechanic Boniface Mgala told the BBC about his ordeal in April when he was badly beaten by those convinced he was a genital thief.
His experience was similar to those in videos seen by the BBC: men claim that their genital organs – penis and testicles – have vanished or shrivelled after coming into contact with strangers and a mob then demands that alleged perpetrators return what they have supposedly stolen.
Such claims are rooted in longstanding fears and superstitions – and are not new on the continent, particularly in communities where belief in witchcraft remains widespread. Social media has amplified these fears.
The recent wave of rumours appears to have started last year in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where similar claims had surfaced in 2008.
They progressively spread across the region to Burundi, Zambia and Tanzania as well as Mozambique, Angola, Malawi and Kenya.
In Zambia, the hearsay about disappearing genitals first gained traction in March when a woman was lynched, going on to spread panic across the border in Tanzania.
At his home in Mpemba near Tunduma, a busy trading town in Tanzania by the border with Zambia, Mgala traces his fingers along the sickle-shaped scar that runs down the right side of his head as he reflects on his traumatic experience.
“If I had known how close I would have come to death on that day, I wouldn’t have gone into that restaurant to eat. Only we don’t know how close death is,” the mechanic says.
He and his friend had gone into Tunduma on 1 April to meet a client about a car sale and decided to eat lunch beforehand.
They had not long sat down in the restaurant when they were dragged outside by a mob.
Two smaller scars on his chin and a missing tooth are other visible marks of his ordeal.
Amid the beating, he lost consciousness. Mgala regained awareness in hospital two days later to news that his friend had been killed.
Back at his house where he lives with his wife and their four children, he now walks with a limp and says he also suffers from constant headaches.
He has not been able to return to work at his mechanic shop but says neighbours and friends have helped cover the cost of some of the medicine he needs.
On the same day that Mgala and his friend were attacked, commercial photographer and businessman Michael Silavwe says he witnessed another similar assault in Tunduma, where he says anxiety had been building after videos about stolen genitalia had begun circulating on TikTok.
Outside his shop he saw people running and says he learned that a man had been accused nearby and was being beaten – and later set on fire.
“After they set him on fire, the police arrived at the scene and everyone scattered and ran away,” the 23-year-old told the BBC.
In a video of the attack verified by the BBC Global Disinformation Unit and viewed more than 100,000 times across TikTok and Facebook, a group is seen beating a man while demanding he return the victim’s allegedly stolen genitals. – BBC
