Remember Ebola? It killed more than 8,000 people last year — before we were all Charlie — with a quarter as many again dying since January. Almost all the deaths have occurred in the war-weakened west African states of Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone; no licensed drug or vaccine yet exists for a virus that claimed its first victim almost 40 years ago in Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of Congo.
The spread of that maiden epidemic northwards over the border with Sudan is the basis for Amir Tag Elsir’s punchy short novel, Ebola ’76, originally published three years ago and now translated with fluency and keen timing by two young Arabists, in a fetching edition from a small London outfit focused on African and Middle Eastern subjects.
Elsir, a doctor from Sudan, weaves a busy urban tapestry around the bungling figure of Louis, a married cotton worker who brings Ebola to his home town after getting fresh with a young vagrant selling herself to tourists in Zaire, where Louis was mourning the death of a mistress.
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