Unmanned

Fig 1.

These dispatches are from #VQRTrueStory, our social-media experiment in nonfiction, which you can follow by visiting us on Instagram: @vqreview.

Serrekunda’s beach, the Gambia’s biggest tourist draw, empty again. Two years ago it was fear of Ebola. Now, political crisis, checkpoints, soldiers with AK-47s, bazookas. Alex Sesouy, a tourist guide, had time to talk. Still, he hesitated. "I didn't believe. And then it happened to me myself.” He’d been down here playing football when some men from Mali came up to ask directions, put out their hands. Sesouy had a bad feeling. “We’re living in a world where you don’t trust no one.” But this was the smiling coast. Gambians shook hands, visited, nothing but time, thousands of young guys here in the capital region, away from home trying to provide, but no work anywhere. Also, Sesouy was polite. So he gave the Malian men directions, shook hands one by one.

A few minutes later, he went cold all over—cold, electric—“I felt something coming out of me.” Sesouy looked in his shorts, then screamed. His friends rushed over. “I lost my dick!”

Sesouy knew what had happened: One of the Malians had been a marabout, an Islamic holy man gone bad, using juju for profit, stealing Sesouy’s penis for ransom.

Sesouy held up a fist, thumb slotted between his fingers, just a nub poking through. “It was like this, rus”—a Wolof word for “shrink.” But, wait, that just sounded like swimming in cold water had... Then again, this close to the equator, the water didn’t get cold.

Later, one of the Malian men told Sesouy he could have his penis back, for 300 euros. Sesouy and his friends did go to the marabout, but instead of paying him—Sesouy had no money—they beat him up and dragged him to a police station. “I went into the toilet with the policeman and showed him.” The marabout denied he was a marabout, but the cops beat him anyway, until he confessed and agreed to return the penis. “Then,” Sesouy said, “my cock is calm.” In the end, the Malians were deported.

Sounds scary, I said, also thinking of the cops, the violence on the guy who, maybe, was just asking directions. “What can I do?” Sesouy said, staring at the folded beach chairs, the shuttered snack stands, the stray cattle straggling across the sand. No work anywhere. “If I don’t have my dick,” he said, “I am not a man.”