Tag Archives: Congo

Anti-gay politicians are pushing the Democratic Republic of the Congo to follow Uganda’s lead on criminalizing homosexuality. Via Think Africa Press: Last December, Steve Mbikayi, an MP with the Parti Travailliste Congolais (PTC), introduced a draft bill to the Congolese National Assembly that would explicitly criminalise homosexuality. The DRC is one of the relatively few African countries in which homosexual …

The Washington Post has published a fascinating history of the origins of HIV, based on the fairly widely-accepted theory that the virus sprang from chimp to human during the tumultuous colonial days of western Africa, possibly beginning in the 1880s. Most of this colonial world didn’t have enough potential victims for such a fragile virus to start a major epidemic. …

The New York Times reports that armed militias are raping male villagers in the Congo in order to force them into submitting to their control. According to Oxfam, Human Rights Watch, United Nations officials and several Congolese aid organizations, the number of men who have been raped has risen sharply in recent months, a consequence of joint Congo-Rwanda military operations …

I was going to headline this post Cock-Jacking, but that might have been misleading. From Kinshasa, Congo: Police in Congo have arrested 13 suspected sorcerers accused of using black magic to steal or shrink men’s penises after a wave of panic and attempted lynchings triggered by the alleged witchcraft. Reports of so-called penis snatching are not uncommon in West Africa, …