In September 2003, a Sudanese merchant was visited by a customer who had travelled to Khartoum from West Africa. The two men became embroiled in an argument during which the West African grabbed the shop-keeper’s hand and shook it violently; almost immediately the merchant could feel his penis beginning to shrivel as it withdrew into his body. Terrified at the thought of losing his manhood, the merchant became hysterical and had to be taken to hospital where doctors could find nothing wrong with him.

This was not an isolated incident: in the days afterwards, at least another 40 men were hospitalised after having had their penises ‘stolen’ by a mysterious West African. 1

The shrinking penis panic that swept through Khartoum in 2003 was the latest outbreak of koro, a psychiatric disorder that causes men to believe their penises (or, more rarely, women to believe their labia) have shrunk back into their bodies. Koro usually occurs as isolated cases but in appropriate circumstances it can manifest itself as a wave of panic that sweeps through cities, countries or even entire continents. As a consequence, hospitals and police stations can become clogged with dozens or even hundreds of people all reporting the magical theft of their manhood.

The Khartoum panic of 2003 typifies how mass koro epidemics occur. For weeks the streets had been alive with rumours of a mysterious West African (sometimes called ‘Satan’s Friend’, at other times identified as a Zionist troublemaker) who was causing men’s penises to disappear after shaking their hands. In September, a local newspaper printed the story of the merchant’s vanishing manhood; this seemed to raise levels of panic, because afterwards the hospitals were flooded with dozens of hysterical men claiming that their penises had been stolen.

Doctors couldn’t find a single case of a missing organ and proclaimed the illness to be psychosomatic – but this didn’t stop the local police from rounding up 50 unfortunate foreigners on suspicion of practising sorcery. The panic continued for several days with one Sudanese newspaper reporting that: “The situation has reached the point where a wife accompanying her husband to the front door at home bids him farewell by saying, ‘Be careful not to shake hands with men, but you can shake the girls’ hands as much as you want’.” As with most koro panics, after a couple of weeks the hysteria died down leaving the Sudanese authorities bemused as to its origin. 2

In fact, what happened in Khartoum was part of a general wave of koro hysteria that has been sweeping central and western Africa for over a decade. The first traceable outbreak occurred in Nigeria in 1990 when rumours of ‘strangers’ who could magically steal penises swept through Lagos.3 The trouble seems to have remained in Nigeria until August 1996, when three suspected penis snatchers were hanged by a mob in neighbouring Cameroon. In the following year, the koro panic spread westwards through Togo, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Senegal and Gambia. In each country there were violent riots that saw dozens of suspected sorcerers lynched; one incident in Nigeria in 2001 claimed the lives of eight Christian evangelists who were burnt to death by an angry mob; another in Ghana caused 12 deaths.

The panic in Khartoum was the most northerly recorded incidence of African koro and is unusual in that Sudan doesn’t share a land border with any of the other koro-stricken countries. However, the fact that the Sudanese blamed West African magicians for the vanishing penises suggests that this was the continued expression of the panics that had swept through other African countries between 1990 and 2003 and which still periodically fl are up. (The latest outbreak of African koro occurred in Nigeria in March 2006 when two alleged penis-snatchers were arrested in separate incidents.) 4

Although Africa has produced the most spectacular episodes of mass koro, the disorder did not originate there. Koro is better known from Southeast Asia where it is linked to large communities of ethnic Chinese workers. (The term is believed to come from the Malay word for a turtle, perhaps because the shrinking penis mimics the way this animal’s head withdraws into its shell.) Like the African panics, Asian koro only occurs in closeknit ethnic communities that have a strong belief in the power of ritual magic. This link between ethnicity and koro has led to it being described as a “culture-bound syndrome”, which means that only those who believe in the ability for penises to disappear magically will end up experiencing it.

Koro has an ancient history in the Far East, but the most spectacular and best-studied epidemic occurred within the Chinese community living in Singapore. In October 1967, rumours that local pork was impregnated with female hormones led to at least 446 men (and 23 women) turning up at hospitals insisting that their genitals had shrunk. One hospital had 97 patients on a single day and saw several men who had clamped their private parts with various objects so as to halt the perceived shrinkage; others arrived with friends and neighbours hanging onto them.

The Singapore outbreak lasted only a few days and afterwards was the subject of a government-led psychiatric study which concluded that: “…in a susceptible individual, hearsay information about koro, along with pre-existing sexual fears and subjective sensations in the genitalia associated with such phenomena as sexual intercourse, urination, defecation, or trauma, leads to the vicious circle of the delusion of genital shrinkage, attendant panic, and enhanced fears of a delusory nature, with even greater panic and crude attempts to prevent the disappearance of the penis.” 5

Since 1967, Asian koro panics have occurred in China, Hong Kong and India, but thanks to better education, they are increasingly rare. No link has yet been found between Asian koro and the panics in West Africa. Because of its culture-bound nature, koro is rarely encountered in European and American countries and then only as individual cases (usually as a drug withdrawal symptom). However, Westerners can be subject to other culturebound disorders, especially ones linked to strong religious belief. One especially salient case is the ‘divine dentistry’ panic of 1999 when members of an evangelical Christian movement in North America, South Africa and Europe reported the spontaneous appearance of gold fillings in their mouths. The panic only stopped when local dentists announced that it had been them, and not God, who had repaired the teeth (see FT128: 22–23).