In mid-March dozens of foreigners began arriving in Angola's remote northern province of Uige. The strangers, who were mostly white, declined polite handshakes and interfered with hallowed burial customs, explaining their actions with a strange foreign word: Marburg.

The people of Uige, bordering the Democratic Republic of Congo, were already terrified by a spate of sudden deaths, mostly of children, from an incurable haemorrhage fever. Some greeted the foreigners angrily, pelting their vehicles with rocks and driving them out of their villages.