rees while the other members of the tribe dance around and go wild
with religious fervor calling to their gods while the victim screeches
with pain in his slowly approaching death throes. Young girls, women,
boys and men are often accused of witchcraft. One method they used of
telling whether the victim accused was innocent or guilty was to give
them a liquid poison made from the juice of several poisonous plants. If
they could drink it and live they were innocent, if they died they were
guilty. In most cases death was almost instantaneous. Some vomited the
poison from their stomachs and lived.

The Bakubas sometimes resorted to cannibalism and my husband told me
of a Bakuba girl who ate her own mother. Once a snake bit a man and he
at once called the witch doctor. The snake was a poisonous one and the
man bitten was in great pain. The witch doctor whooped and went through
several chants but the man got worse instead of better. The witch doctor
then told the man that his wife made the snake bite him by witchery and
that she should die for the act. The natives gathered at once in
response to the witch doctor's call and the woman was executed at once.
The man bitten by the snake finally died but the witch doctor had
shifted the responsibility of his failure to help the man to his wife
who had been beheaded. The witch doctor had justified himself and the
incident was closed.

The tribe ruled by a King has two or more absolute rules. The Kings
word is law and he has the power to condemn any subject to death at any
time without trial. If he becomes angry or offended with any of his
wives a nod and a word to his bodyguard and the woman is led away to
execution. Any person of the tribe is subject to the King's will with
the exemption of the witch doctor. Executions of a different nature than
the ones described above are common occurrences. For general crimes the
culprit after being condemned to death is placed in a chair shaped very
much like the electric chairs used in American prisons in taking the
lives of the condemned. He is then tied firmly to the chair with thongs.
A pole made of a green sapling is firmly implanted in the earth nearby.
A thong is placed around the neck of the victim under the chin. The
sapling is then bent over and the other end of the thong tied to the end
of the sapling pole. The pole stretches the neck to its full length and
holds the head erect. Drums are sometimes beaten to drown the cries of
thos