On 25 April 2024, David Reubi was invited to speak at a workshop on Cancers in the South [Cancers aux Sud] at the Centre for Population & Development at the University Paris-Cite. His presentation was an archeological excavation of the Registre du Cancer d’Abidjan in the Ivory Coast – one of the multiple surveillance sites where data on cancer are collected, verified, coded, recorded and then sent to the WHO’s International Agency for Research on Cancer, where the data is integrated with data from other sites and transformed into the famous Global Cancer Maps used by governments, researchers, pharmaceutical companies and activists the world over. Drawing on his archival and fieldwork, David explored three types of infrastructure that make up Abidjan’s cancer registry possible: (1) the social lives and labour of the data collectors; (2) the postcolonial dreams of modernity that informed the efforts of the different generations of African doctors that built the registre; and (3) the colonial architectural and intellectual ruins on which the current register stands.
