They would have killed the man instantly but for their fear of the French government; for the town was close beside the capital. When I tried to reason with them, they answered me with the all-sufficient exclamation: “Ask the boy! Ask him yourself!” Those who took the leading part in this trial were dressed like Europeans. Sickness and death, they believe, may be caused by fetish medicine, which need not be administered to the victim, but is usually laid beside the path where he is about to pass. Others may pass and it will do them no harm. The parings of finger-nails, the hair of the victim and such things are powerful ingredients in these “medicines.” An Mpongwe, after having his hair cut, gathers up every hair most carefully and burns it lest an enemy should secure it and use it to his injury. When sickness continues for a length of time they usually conclude that some offended relation has caused an evil spirit to abide in the town. An Mpongwe man, Ayenwe, had a severe attack of inflammatory rheumatism. I was going to see him regularly and doing what little I could for him. But his mother’s people, who lived in a town four miles away, concluded that it was a spell of witchcraft, inflicted by his father’s people. So they came one stormy night at midnight and stealing him out of his house, put him in a canoe and carried him on the rough sea to their town. The patient can always be prevailed upon by his relations, if there are enough of them to wear out his resistance. However strongly he may object at first he will finally throw up his hands and say: “Kill me if you will then. The responsibility is yours; I have nothing more to do with it.” A man’s very soul is not his own in Africa.