At least 60 people have been killed in the past month, accused of using sorcery to shrink or steal penises. It is believed that a look, or a touch, or a handshake is enough to do it. A person is accused, a mob forms, and the victim is lynched. The panic started in Cabo Delgado on 18 April and has spread south to all provinces. More than 60 people have been killed, including two teachers, a nurse, a police officer, and a municipal official. But no victims with shrunken or stolen penises have been found.
"A clinical psychologist, Ibraimo Colabo, told reporters that eight men had gone to the hospital complaining that their genitals had shrunk. But medical examination showed that there was nothing physically wrong with them. However, two of them were in a state of panic, resulting from their belief in the rumour," reported AIM (28 April)
Several hundred people in the mobs have been arrested. In Chimoio, Manica, where a teacher was beaten to death, "the individual who claimed to have his penis shrunk was taken to a police station, where it was found that his genitals were intact, proving it to be a mere rumour", AIM reported (5 May).
Indeed, Frelimo party and government officials up to President Daniel Chapo have made statements saying no genitals have been shrunk or stolen, and that it is fake news. But Frelimo is not trusted, and panic and fear are easily whipped up. (Widely reported by LUSA, AIM, Zitamar, Mediafax, television stations.)
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Paul Fauvet of AIM (27 April) noted that "there is nothing new in the charges of witches stealing penises. The claim was also made during the witch hunts in medieval Europe. The notorious 15th century witch-hunting manual 'Malleus Malificarum' ('Hammer of the Witches') claimed that witches could steal penises, and even transform them into pets."
Stolen penises seem new in Mozambique but two Mozambican anthropologists have studied other phenomenon which may be related. Mozambique has repeatedly had cholera riots, in which local people think that instead of putting chlorine in water, health workers are actually putting cholera in the public water. This regularly leads to the lynching of health workers and local Frelimo officials. In 1998 the late anthropologist Carlos Serra sent out teams of UEM students to investigate. They were shocked with what the found. Poor people in many areas believed that the local elites wanted them dead. It was not that they wanted to just exploit the poor, but wanted to kill them. (Cólera e catarse, 2003 edition with English preface) In Mozambican cholera outbreaks there are still uprisings and lynching and health posts closed, because of the total distrust of local elites.
Alcinda Honwana in her 2012 book The time of youth: work, social change, and politics in Africa describes the prolonged period of time when African young people are "no longer children but not yet independent adults," which she called "waithood". Becoming independent adults is about being established with livelihoods and families. To be a "man" means having a job and family. The growing crisis in Africa is the lack of jobs, which means a boy cannot become a man. The Generation Z demonstrations in Mozambique November 2024 to March 2025 were about both stolen elections and about the lack of jobs and future.
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Putting these two anthropological ideas together may explain what is happening. Waithood and the lack of jobs is a symbolic castration - young males are stopped from becoming real "men". The cholera riots are about the belief by the poor that elites want them dead. It is not a long step to believing that elites want poor young men castrated.
