The Lower Regions of Upper Volta

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Mark Steyn:

I confess I don’t think about the country formerly known as Upper Volta terribly often. In fact, I believe the last time I did was seven or so years ago, when I was having a drink with my favorite foreign minister, Australia’s Alexander Downer, and, as one does, we got into an argument about Burkina Faso. Mr Downer had been explaining his reluctance to sign up for some UN body or other because he didn’t want to spend all his time stuck on a pointless committee with “some busted-arse country like Burkina Faso”. (I believe “busted-arse country” is the stage that comes after “failed state”.)

Anyway, after three or four such references, I demanded to know whether the minister could even name Burkina Faso’s present head of government. He acknowledged that, alas, he hadn’t been paying as close attention to the affairs of Burkina Faso as he might, and, pulling out his BlackBerry, he went to the BBC website and read from their comprehensive and authoritative page on the nation, which began:

Burkina Faso is a poor country by West African standards.

“Crikey,” said Minister Downer.

As it turns out, Burkina Faso is not a busted-arse country but a busted-penis country:

A man was killed by a mob Monday in Koudougou, a town in central Burkina Faso, after being accused of making another man’s penis “disappear”. It was not an isolated incident: there has been an increase in the number of these strange accusations being made in recent weeks.

The trouble started at a local restaurant:

The first man, a local mechanic, claimed that his penis had been “stolen” by the second man, who was not from the district. The first man called the police. But by then, a crowd had gathered around them. Incensed, the residents decided to lynch the man in the middle of the street.

Cyrille Zoma, a reporter for L’Observateur Paalga, says there have been a dozen penis disappearances in Koudougou this month:

It’s always the same story: someone complains about being approached and touched by a stranger, someone not from the neighbourhood. Immediately, the alleged victims complain of lower stomach pains, tremors, and say they can’t feel their genitals anymore. This only happens with men, and I have been told of it happening in several different parts of town.

The penis snatchers are usually foreigners – in Monday’s lynching it was a Burundian. Meanwhile, Koudougou’s deputy mayor, Gaston Kagambega, has called for calm:

The mayor has also set up a crisis cell at Koudougou’s medical centre to meet with people who say they’ve been victims of “penis thieves”.

This all rang a bell with me. And indeed, if you turn to page 139 of my bestselling book America Alone, personally autographed copies of which are exclusively available from the SteynOnline bookstore and help to support my pushback against climate mullah Michael E Mann …where was I? Oh, yes. America Alone, page 139:

I hadn’t really followed Sudanese current events closely since, oh, General Kitchener’s victory at the Battle of Omdurman in 1898, but in 2003 a story from that benighted land happened to catch my eye. In the fall of that year mass hysteria apparently swept the capital city, Khartoum, after reports that foreigners were shaking hands with Sudanese men and causing their penises to disappear. One victim, a fabric merchant, told his story to the London Arabic newspaper Al-Quds Al-Arabi: a man from West Africa came into the shop and “shook the store owner’s hand powerfully until the owner felt his penis melt into his body.”

I know the feeling. The same thing happened to me after shaking hands with Senator Clinton. Anyway, as Al-Quds reported, “The store owner became hysterical, and was taken to the hospital.” The country’s chief criminal attorney general, Yasser Ahmad Muhammad, told the Sudanese daily Al-Rai Al-A’am that “the rumor broke out when one merchant went to another merchant to buy some Karkady [a Sudanese beverage]. Suddenly, the seller felt his penis shriveling.” The invaluable Middle East Media Research Institute, in its exhaustive coverage, noted that the penises of Khartoum were vulnerable not merely to handshaking: “Another victim, who refused to give his name, said that while he was at the market, a man approached him, gave him a comb, and asked him to comb his hair. When he did so, within seconds, he said, he felt a strange sensation and discovered that he had lost his penis.”

Tales of the vanishing penises ran rampant through the city. Sudan’s attorney general, Salah Abu Zayed, declared that all complaints about missing dangly bits would be brought before a special investigative committee, though doctors had determined that the first plaintiff was “perfectly healthy.” The health minister, Ahmad Bilal Othman, said that the epidemic was “scientifically groundless,” and that it was “sorcery, magic, or an emotional problem.”

Whatever it is, it’s the perfect tale of Islamic victimhood:

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Gotta love Mark Steyn.
This reminds me of scurrilous magazines I saw 60 years ago, describing appliances one could purchase in order to keep one’s penis from disappearing. This phenomenon is an episodic one, like the campaigns to eliminate witchcraft.
The physical sensation is a diversion of blood flow from the genital area, as a response to a perceived threat.
But don’t try to convince uninformed persons of the details of blood flow.
Hysteria is much more fun.
Perhaps this can be the theme of the Democratic campaign to keep the Senate!

Mass hysteria is not something we see anymore in the USA.
But in Islamic lands where no non-koranic books are read* and only the local and visiting imams preach as if quoting from ”holy books,” it still happens more often than is reported in the press.
As you can tell, these ignorant people use the excuse of mass hysteria to MURDER people they consider strangers.
Other cases I had heard of included men telling their wives they should deliver a SON and upon getting a daughter seeing a devil instead so they had to smother it to death.
I also read about men who interpreted their wife wanting a divorce as indicating she was possessed of a demon or geni so they had to kill her.
Even inside the USA these men get away with these murders because our system calls Islam a peaceful religion but any adherent who allows his Islamic teachings to become reality so that deaths occur is somehow ”insane.”
Notice that doctors found nothing wrong with these hysterics.
Their dangly bits were all in order.

NEW book publications by country:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Books_published_per_country_per_year

For those interested in Burkina Faso (Upper Volta), there is an organization called “Friends of Burkina Faso.” To get a better view of the place, its people and its problems, go on-line. “Weman con laafi!” (God grant health.)