Chapter 14 - A Long Journey

Summary

Chapter 14 assembles the pieces of the puzzle described in the preceding twelve chapters into a coherent narrative of HIV’s journey, from when the first patient was infected somewhere in south-east Cameroon at the turn of the twentieth century until this ‘new’ disease was recognised in the USA in June 1981. The virus first travelled from its Cameroonian crucible to Léopoldville (Kinshasa), where it arrived around 1920, brought either by the crew of the steamships that transported various commodities for export or by troops from the two Congos that had been dispatched to invade south-east Cameroon during the Great War. Léopoldville was the turning point in HIV’s fateful journey, the place where it slowly progressed over some thirty years before expanding more rapidly in the 1950s.