Claire and his group's self-isolation was unsupervised, but East Africa was not afraid of the people from Rovenaad Village running about everywhere. As a relatively underdeveloped region, Nile Province not only had a sparse population but also terribly backward transportation. Wandering around carelessly could very well get someone killed.
Rovenaad Village had only one road leading to the city, and East Africa had not built it—it had been trodden out by the local Black people themselves. One could imagine how poor the road conditions were. Of course, this did not mean East Africa had no intention of building roads; Rovenaad Village was a newly established immigrant settlement, and East Africa simply had not yet found the time to attend to it.
There was one necessary prerequisite for building roads: roads were meant for people to travel on. Since no one had originally lived in the area around Rovenaad Village, there had been no need to build any roads. They could hardly finish the roads only to let the animals use them!
In fact, Rovenaad Village was not an isolated case. Every year, as East Africa pushed development inland, many new villages sprang up. These villages lacked everything, including infrastructure such as roads.
Of course, there were exceptions—for example, settlements assigned to areas beside existing highways or railways. Many immigrants in Matabele Province, for instance, lived along both sides of the Central Railway.
"Seeing this place really makes me miss the days when I first arrived in East Africa. Still, new immigrants have it far better now than we did back then," Claire remarked to his assistant after temporarily settling down in Rovenaad Village.
Rovenaad Village was much like the second place he had stayed after first arriving in East Africa. He had come ashore in Mombasa, then later arrived at