Maps of Malignancy: Epidemiologists and Cancer in Sub-Saharan Africa

Epidemiological efforts to map cancer in sub-Saharan Africa have a long history, playing an important role in how the disease has been imagined in the region.

In the late colonial and early postcolonial period, British and French doctors produced small-scale epidemiological maps to advance understandings of cancer aetiology and improve treatment strategies at home.

More recently, global surveillance initiatives seeking to rationalise health policy and planning in Africa have generated political atlases of the continent with national cancer burdens.

This project carries out an archival and ethnographic study of these epidemiological efforts to chart malignancy in sub-Saharan Africa over the past 70-years.

It takes these cartographies of diseases as its object of study, examining their scientific, political and material conditions of possibility and analysing their influence on cancer imaginaries and healthcare policies in Africa.

In doing so, the project aims to draw attention to the crucial role that epidemiological maps have played in the postcolonial history of biomedicine in Africa, while developing an innovative approach to epidemiological surveillance that highlights its socio-technical infrastructure and performative power.

At the same time, the project also purports to move Africa out of the margins of the global history of cancer.