Late last year, men in parts of Congo’s Tshopo province began whispering about something strange that was happening in nearby villages. At first, the stories sounded too absurd to travel far. A man in a market claimed his genitals had suddenly shrunk after brushing against a stranger. Someone else said it happened inside a taxi. In another village, people spoke about a man who returned from town convinced that the part of his body had disappeared altogether.

And then the videos started appearing, people gathered around phones watching clips of alleged victims speaking inside crowded churches while pastors stood beside them claiming they had been cured through prayer. Some videos spread through Facebook pages and TikTok accounts. Others moved from phone to phone through Bluetooth shares and WhatsApp groups, spreading across villages faster than official information ever could.

In many places, the rumours arrived before the authorities did. By the time officials in Tshopo publicly denied the existence of any mysterious illness, fear had already settled across parts of northeastern Democratic Republic of Congo, where rumours, churches, and social media had combined to create something more powerful than a simple falsehood. Men spoke cautiously around strangers. Communities became suspicious of outsiders. Stories changed slightly depending on who was telling them, but the central fear remained the same.

Something was stealing men’s bodies. In the month of October, the health workers travelling through the Isangi area of Tshopo province arrived in villages already consumed by weeks of panic. They carried tablet computers, questionnaires, and reflective jackets as part of vaccination-related field surveys, but in some communities those unfamiliar objects and routines were interpreted very differently by residents who had spent weeks hearing that outsiders were spreading a disease that caused men’s genitalia to shrink or disappear.

According to Reuters, at least four health workers were later killed after crowds accused them of spreading the supposed illness.

One of them was Dr. John Tangakeya. His wife later told Reuters that the family had spoken to him earlier that day because it was his birthday. The children were waiting for him to come home that evening so that they could celebrate together. Instead, news arrived that the health team he was part of had been attacked by mobs even as they tried to explain that their surveys had nothing to do with the rumours spreading in the province.

The World Health Organization(WHO)-backed Africa Infodemic Response Alliance, which monitors dangerous health misinformation across Africa, later linked at least 17 killings to the rumours, though some incidents could not be independently verified.

Long before social media existed, versions of this panic had already travelled across parts of Africa.

Researchers have documented similar episodes for decades in Ghana, Nigeria, Cameroon, Benin, and Congo itself, where rumours of “penis theft” or genital shrinking periodically triggered mob attacks against people accused of witchcraft or supernatural powers. In Ghana, during the 1990s, several people accused of “penis snatching” were beaten to death by mobs. In Kinshasa, in 2008, police detained more than a dozen suspected “sorcerers” after panic spread through the capital and led to attempted lynchings.

Anthropologists who study such incidents have often argued that the panic is not simply about superstition. In many places, fears around genital theft became tied to larger anxieties about masculinity, illness, vulnerability, power, and social instability, particularly in societies where spiritual explanations for misfortune remain deeply embedded in everyday life.

But something about the Congo episode felt different. Earlier, panic spread through markets, crowded taxis, churches, and radio broadcasts. This time, much of the fear moved online first, where videos featuring alleged victims and miracle cures circulated rapidly through algorithm-driven feeds before local officials fully understood what was unfolding on the ground.

Several churches in Kisangani hosted testimonies from supposed victims while Facebook pages and TikTok accounts reposted clips that gathered hundreds of thousands of views. Some videos remained online even after authorities publicly dismissed the claims as false.

Health officials later said the violence exposed a deeper crisis facing public health systems in parts of Africa, where distrust toward authorities has been shaped by years of political instability, misinformation, and memories of earlier health emergencies, including Ebola and COVID-19 outbreaks, during which some communities viewed outside medical teams with suspicion.

In villages where people had already spent weeks discussing the rumours among themselves, the arrival of unfamiliar health workers carrying devices and asking questions appeared, for some residents, to confirm the fears they already believed were true.

Months later, the rumours have still not completely disappeared.

Officials continue running radio campaigns and public awareness programmes aimed at stopping the spread of misinformation. Arrests have been made in some areas. But many of the original videos are still circulating online, resurfacing again and again across different parts of Congo, long after authorities declared that the illness itself never existed.