Central African tribes are greatly influenced by their superstitions. Like the North American Indians, they have their medicine men who conjure up all sorts of occult prognostications of imminent and mysterious phenomena. With them the fetish doctor is little less than a god. If this wise man asserts that a village has suffered ill-luck because the new moon dips to the left or right, his deluded followers collect their effects, devastate the village, and move into some region which he may indicate is free from that curse. If rain has not fallen in sufficient quantity, and the crops surrounding the village have withered, or if the rain has been too abundant, the fetish doctor may forthwith present an explanation based upon some new superstition. Indeed, there are thousands of tribal beliefs in the Congo Free State which are for ever disturbing the settlement of the population. Implacable enemies of the Congo Free State, not wholly ignorant of these tribal beliefs and customs, pretend to regard the migratory nature of the Central African savage as evidence of his fear of the State’s government, arising from a feeling of insecurity. Such persons point to the native’s incorrigible habit of moving his abode as an unmistakable sign of his desire to escape from the barbarities practised upon him by officers and soldiers of the Congo Government. In this way it is sought to deceive those who are unacquainted with the habits of the black man—the man who, a few years ago, ate his brother with a relish which civilised white men can hardly conceive. The State, however, fully cognisant of the natural habits of its black subjects, has often considered the question of how to deal effectually with these displacements of the population. There are times when neither superstition nor tribal custom causes a large exodus from a well-established village. Sometimes the fertility and luxuriant grass of another region attracts the more enterprising black, who has learned to cultivate his own land. Allured by glowing accounts of such a nature he gathers about him his friends and family, and makes off to what he considers to be a new Eldorado. In a short time, the _diablerie_ of the fetish doctor has again unsettled him.