REPORTS of genital theft are a relatively common occurrence across West and Central Africa, scholars say.

Academics observing reports of penis snatching on the 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 centres 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, 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, she wrote in a report on alternet.org.

'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,' she wrote.

Several eyewitnesses assured her the 'appendages did indeed shrink dramatically'.



Originally published as 'Penis snatcher's' horror handshake