A World Health Organization photo record shows villagers lining up for smallpox vaccination at an outdoor clinic in Côte d’Ivoire in the 1970s. The caption directly supplies the country, decade, medical purpose and existence of the line; there is no need to infer a queue merely from the existence of a vaccination campaign. The source does not provide the village name, number of people or waiting time. At the wider historical level, eradication programmes combined mass vaccination with case detection and ring vaccination around possible contacts. Smallpox was eliminated from Africa in 1977. This documented line shows the local form taken by that global programme. An international objective became practical only when health workers brought vaccine to communities and residents presented themselves one by one at an outdoor clinic.