“Ka taimaka abokina, an sace azzakarina! Bari in gani? A’a, ina tsammanin kuna fama da Koro!“.
You can Google-translate this little Hausa conversation, but freely translated it roughly means, “Friend, help! I think my penis has been stolen…Let’s see then. No man, you’re just suffering from Koro!“. I was reading the paper this morning and came across a headline that screamed,“Koro syndrome: What to know about genital shrinkage.
Now you should know that in Nigeria we have some serious newspapers, but also some local suffragettes. Actually, those are much more fun because the journos who write for these papers don’t take themselves so seriously. Also, I can’t quite shake the impression that serious journalism still sometimes gets reimbursed for certain politically sensitive opinion pieces. So it can be argued that the most objective reporting of domestic news is better sought in the tabloids. The undertone may be different, but the factual account all the more complete.
One of those tabloid newspapers that I eagerly take a quick look through every day is the so-called PUNCH Magazine, The Most Widely Read Newspaper. Headline snapping is fine on the phone, the paper is readable online for free (unlike almost all news stories from Dutch newspapers), and in addition to the “serious” news, there is more than enough attention to the entertaining side.
