A Road Out

A Road Out invites you to explore how community health initiatives can cross borders and cultures, showing what medicine can achieve when healthcare professionals and communities work together to heal and thrive. Filled with photographs, interviews, film clips, and maps, the documentary tells the remarkable story of how ideas about community health traveled from South Africa to the American South in the years after World War II. Unlike the usual story where knowledge flows from the U.S. to other countries, A Road Out reveals how innovative South African health workers, fleeing apartheid, brought groundbreaking approaches that helped reshape public health in America. In South Africa’s rural KwaZulu-Natal, these pioneers worked closely with Zulu communities, coming to understand how poverty, racism, and social factors deeply affect health. They saw the whole community—not just individuals—as the focus of care, and recognized the value of involving local people in research, preventative measures, and responses to disease. Their trailblazing grassroots model became a blueprint adopted by American doctors and health professionals, inspiring the first community health center in Mound Bayou, Mississippi. Today, health centers like these help millions of people across the U.S., keeping the values of fairness, care, and community alive.

Duke Scholars