The traveller in the Congo will frequently observe repulsive disfigurements in the natives, and is very liable to attribute to the cruelty of oppression what are but manifestations of old-time tribal customs. The danger is accentuated by the organised campaign of slander now proceeding against the Congo Free State, which does not scruple to make capital out of such an opportune circumstance. Almost all the tribes entertain a hazy notion of an invisible Supreme Being; but they regard themselves as of no account in His estimation, and direct their petitions for supernatural aid to their fetiches, which they endeavour to propitiate by gifts through the medium of their witch doctor or medicine man, a kind of priest who pretends to possess supernatural powers and abuses the credulity of his followers to an extraordinary extent. [Sidenote: Strangling Widows.] Among the Mangbettus, a dead chief is buried in a sitting posture, in the centre of a new hut specially built on the banks of a stream. Five of his widows are strangled and their bodies laid out with their feet towards their dead husband. The bodies are then covered with bark-cloth saturated with palm oil, after which the spot is held to be sacred and must not be approached, under penalty of death, by anybody but the ruling chief and one attendant. [Sidenote: The Azandé.] At the mouth of the Uelle is found the great mass of the Azandé, a very numerous and important tribe, who range the country from 23 degrees east to 30 degrees west, and from 6 degrees north to 3 degrees south. There are three subdivisions of the Azandé—the Abandjia, the Avongura, and the Makraka, born fighters all, and devoted to cannibalism. Some of the Azandé men, however, will eat only the flesh of their enemies whom they have slain in battle, declining a diet of human flesh otherwise obtained, though they all (except such of them as dwell south of the Uelle) forbid their women and children to touch it. [Illustration: Kassai Women Returning from Market.] [Illustration: Batetela Women (Lualaba-Kassai).] And here arises a curious subject for speculation. The cannibalistic Azandé are much farther advanced in the arts of peace and war than many other tribes that are not cannibal—the forest Pigmies, for instance. Notwithstanding some peculiar customs concerning them, they hold their women in high regard, and never barter them for goats and cows, the almost universal practice among other Central African tribes. Their skill, too, in agriculture, pottery, and in the making and playing of their musical instruments, seems quite incompatible with their abhorred anthropophagy.