The village of Mékouka, on the upper Ivindo River in northeastern Gabon, offers an instance. Mékouka was one of the gold camps in which the outbreak of 1994 got its start. Three years later, a medical anthropologist named Barry Hewlett, an American, visited there to learn from the villagers themselves how they had thought about and responded to the outbreak. Many local people told him, using a term from their Bakola language, that this Ebola thing was ezanga, meaning some sort of vampirism or evil spirit.
