Democratic Republic Of The Congo May Follow Uganda's Lead On Homosexuality

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 acts have not been directly banned though there is much discrimination against LGBT communities. Throughout February, Mbikayi toured the country to garner popular support for the bill. In addition to radio interviews and television appearances, the MP spoke at a conference organised at the University of Kinshasa where he condemned homosexuality and Western leaders for condoning "unnatural acts" such as paedophilia and bestiality. Mbikayi also defended his bill as being constitutional, citing article 40 of the Congolese constitution, which states that "all individuals have the right to marry a person of their choice of the opposite sex." Mbikayi's bill - which has yet to be made public but which has been seen by Think Africa Press - contains 37 articles that would render homosexuality and transgenderism illegal.

The bill contains a bizarre clause which declares that the government will pay 75% of the cost to "correct hormonal disorders that may result in homosexuality."

On The Origins Of HIV

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. HIV is harder to transmit than many other infections. People can have sex hundreds of times without passing the virus on. To spread widely, HIV requires a population large enough to sustain an outbreak and a sexual culture in which people often have more than one partner, creating networks of interaction that propel the virus onward. To fulfill its grim destiny, HIV needed a kind of place never before seen in Central Africa but one that now was rising in the heart of the region: a big, thriving, hectic place jammed with people and energy, where old rules were cast aside amid the tumult of new commerce. It needed Kinshasa. It was here, hundreds of miles downriver from Cameroon, that HIV began to grow beyond a mere outbreak. It was here that AIDS grew into an epidemic.

Read the full article. (Tipped by JMG reader Greg)

Male Rape Rampant In Congo

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 against rebels that have uncapped an appalling level of violence against civilians. Aid workers struggle to explain the sudden spike in male rape cases. The best answer, they say, is that the sexual violence against men is yet another way for armed groups to humiliate and demoralize Congolese communities into submission. The United Nations already considers eastern Congo the rape capital of the world, and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton is expected to hear from survivors on her visit to the country next week. Hundreds of thousands of women have been sexually assaulted by the various warring militias haunting these hills, and right now this area is going through one of its bloodiest periods in years.

Many of the victims refuse to come forward or seek medical attention as those that do become outcasts to their communities, referred to derisively as "bush wives."

The Freepers react in their usual sympathetic fashion.
- "Sodomites don't care if a man is gay or not... they want to fulfill their lust, like an animal ... that's what Sodomites do and it's very, very close to beastality... we have adjusted and adapted and put up with this filth to the point that we are in the dung hill with them."
- "More AIDS checks from Hussein are on the way!"
- "I'm betting Elton John is booking a week's stay as we speak!"
- "Now that you mention it, I saw Barney Frank was signed up for a trip to the Congo with Anderson Cooper."

Detachable Penis

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, where belief in traditional religions and witchcraft remains widespread, and where ritual killings to obtain blood or body parts still occur.

Rumours of penis theft began circulating last week in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo's sprawling capital of some 8 million inhabitants. They quickly dominated radio call-in shows, with listeners advised to beware of fellow passengers in communal taxis wearing gold rings.

Purported victims, 14 of whom were also detained by police, claimed that sorcerers simply touched them to make their genitals shrink or disappear, in what some residents said was an attempt to extort cash with the promise of a cure.

"You just have to be accused of that, and people come after you. We've had a number of attempted lynchings. ... You see them covered in marks after being beaten," Kinshasa's police chief, Jean-Dieudonne Oleko, told Reuters on Tuesday.

Police arrested the accused sorcerers and their victims in an effort to avoid the sort of bloodshed seen in Ghana a decade ago, when 12 suspected penis snatchers were beaten to death by angry mobs. The 27 men have since been released.

"I'm tempted to say it's one huge joke," Oleko said. "But when you try to tell the victims that their penises are still there, they tell you that it's become tiny or that they've become impotent. To that I tell them, 'How do you know if you haven't gone home and tried it'," he said.

Some Kinshasa residents accuse a separatist sect from nearby Bas-Congo province of being behind the witchcraft in revenge for a recent government crackdown on its members. "It's real. Just yesterday here, there was a man who was a victim. We saw. What was left was tiny," said 29-year-old Alain Kalala, who sells phone credits near a Kinshasa police station.

But now I've got a perfect excuse to post King Missile's 1993 hit, Detachable Penis.