46 [ No. 99 PRESENT CONDITIONS worship or prayer. For practical purposes the worship of the Congo native is animism : he believes himself to be surrounded bycountless spirits usuallymalevolent , invisible to himself, but discernible by the medicine men, of whom in the lower Congo alone there are some fifty different kinds. The medicine man has the power to attract spirits to the fetishes which he manu factures ; and these fetishes have the power either to work evil on the enemy of the man in whose interest the medicine man is employed, or to avert injury from him . On death the spirit survives and may be danger ous ; hence the human sacrifices, especially to dead chiefs, which have so far as possible been suppressed under Belgian rule. Belief in witchcraft is universal and a most potent factor in preventing a rise in the standard of civilization.1 (c) Mohammedanism From the north, Mohammedanism appears never to have made any appreciable advance ; the Mahdists, who might have carried their tenets south from the Sudan, were decisively repelled by the Belgian advance in 1890–98. On the other hand, Arabs from Zanzibar reached Ujiji on Lake Tanganyika in 1840, and by 1865–66 had discovered the Lualaba and the Lomami. By 1871 , when Livingstone reached Nyangwe in the Manyema country, it was already an Arab station ; and by 1879 the Arabs had extended their sphere of control not merely across the Lualaba to the Lomami , but also down the former river to Stanley Falls.2 Until the war of 1892–94 they were in fact the dominant power in the eastern Congo, but since that struggle their political power has been definitely overthrown .

1 Johnston, George Grenfell, ii . 632–71 ; J.H. Weeks, Among Congo Cannibals, pp . 246-93 2 Johnston , i . 84 , 124, 318.