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That Old Black Magic Meets Organ Harvesting
April 24, 2008
Disreputable transnational corporations providing a black market in healthy young organs from Third World countries to satisfy the needs wealthy Western geezers living on borrowed time?
That’s the stuff 'medical thrillers' are made of. Affluent whites feeding like biotech vampires on hapless inhabitants of the nether regions of the North-South divide. The theme appeals not only to third world activists, but is a staple of liberal looniedom in the West.
Great pulp for potboiling paperbacks and made-for-TV movies.
Less likely to make it to either prime time or the best seller list are stories of "organ harvesting" in the Third World of Third Worlders for Third Worlders by Third Worlders.
But the latter is sad fact, not macabre sci-fi. And it’s motivated by what can only be called the blackest of black magic.
Dateline Kinshasa — the capital of the heart of darkness itself, formerly the Belgian Congo, later the Congo (Kinshasa), then Zaire under Mobutu Sese Seko, and now the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Kinshasa is being swept by a wave of panic and lynchings as penis theft panic hits the capital.
The lynchers are not European neo-colonial corporate enforcers or mercenaries in the pay of Western intelligence services. They are locals.
And the lynchees are native sorcerers accused of using black magic to steal or shrink men's penises.
According to Reuters African service, "Reports of so-called penis snatching are not uncommon in West Africa, where belief in traditional religions and witchcraft remains widespread, and where ritual killings to obtain blood or body parts still occur."
The rumors of "penis theft" have been dominating Kinshasa's call-in radio shows, where listeners are advised to beware of fellow passengers in communal taxis wearing gold rings. The sorcerers are said to simply touch their victims, thus causing their genitals to shrink or disappear. Then they attempt to extort cash with the promise of a cure.
Mere mumbo jumbo? Not according to the natives. Twenty-nine-year old Alain Kalala, who sells phone credits near a Kinshasa police station testified that "It's real. Just yesterday here, there was a man who was a victim. We saw. What was left was tiny."
Meanwhile in nearby Gabon, which because of its oil and mineral wealth enjoys the highest Human Development Index (a composite of life expectancy, literacy, education, standard of living, and per capita Gross Domestic Product) in SubSaharan Africa, children are being murdered to provide the parts for magic amulets.Despite its wealth and high (for black Africa) level of education and standard of living, mutilated bodies of children and young adults, drained of blood, line streets of Libreville (no joke, that's the name), Gabon's capital. There are gaping holes in their bodies where their genitals and other organs have been ripped out.
According to some reports, Gabonese politicians use these gruesome black magic rituals to boost their chances of winning lucrative government posts. The rationale is that eating the genitals and other organs of children brings good luck.
So much for wealth + education = democracy and human rights.