The town of Obo lies on a bend of a remote river in a nameless forest in a country whose name--Central African Republic--is generic.
A few miles from Africa's pole of inaccessibility, its farthest point from any ocean, Obo's 15,000 residents build houses of cane and palm thatch, have neither power nor running water and come together at the town church, where the priest still summons his flock with a wooden drum, or at its rudimentary hospital, which boasts a single doctor. Outside town, in any direction, are hundreds of miles of forest, home to nomads, Pygmies and hippos. Yet Obo...