ABSTRACT
It was the rainy season, and the ‘road’ was a string of mudholes cut by running streams. Engines howling, wheels spinning, they proceeded through the forest at walking pace, in continual rain and oppressive heat. Occasionally they came to villages, and at each village they encountered a roadblock of fallen trees. Having had centuries of experience with the smallpox virus, the village elders had instituted their own methods for controlling the virus, according to the received wisdom, which was to cut their villages off from the world, to protect their people from a raging plague. It was reversed quarantine, an ancient practice in Africa, where a village bars itself from strangers during a time of disease, and drives away outsiders who appear.
