David Reubi and Jennifer Fraser presented some of their archival work at the Annual Meeting of the African Cancer Registry Network in Cape Town in October 2024. Most of the early work on cancer in Africa, especially at the height of geographical pathology in the 1950s and 1960s, was done by white colonial doctors in what was then British, French and Portuguese Africa. This is unsurprising in what was then a colonial and racialized world where Africans were usually not allowed to be doctors. In their presentation, David and Jennifer showcased the work of one of the first African doctors to have worked on cancer: Comlan Alfred August Quenum. Specifically, they traced his life and work, from his growing up in French West Africa in the 1930s and 1940s to his work on Kaposi Sarcoma at the Institut Pasteur in colonial Dakar to his work at the WHO’s Office for Africa in Brazzaville in the 1970s.
