Propelled by an early vision to help others, Dr Abba Mallum tells Spotlight about his roots in Borno State, about opportunities in Stellenbosch and Durban, and about his pioneering PhD in radiotherapy and oncology.
In Borno State, Nigeria, soon after graduating from medical school Dr Abba Mallum treated a young patient whose sad plight would shape his future. In Gamboru Ngala, on northeastern Nigeria’s border with Cameroon near Lake Chad, Mallum paid the young woman’s taxi fare to the University of Maiduguri Teaching Hospital – about 150 kilometres away – where she was to have a breast lump removed. But poverty interrupted her pathway to care.
Mallum recounts: “In Nigeria, the healthcare sector is out of pocket. Many people cannot afford it. So as a service to the community that produced me, I was seeing patients for free. A young lady in her twenties had a breast lump and I told her she needs to go to the tertiary centre to have it removed. She said they don’t have transport money. I remember saying to her: ‘I’m not giving you the money in hand.’ Instead, I paid for the taxi and phoned a colleague and told him: ‘There is this patient who is coming, please can you help them’.”
Eight months later, Mallum, then appointed as a resident doctor at Maiduguri Teaching Hospital, saw the young woman again, but she was barely recognisable.
Keep up with the latest headlines on WhatsApp | LinkedIn
“The saddest part is… They were taking me around, introducing the patients,” he recalls. “And then we passed a patient and they told me, this is a lady with breast cancer. She was saying to me: ‘Doctor, I know you’. So when we finished the rounds, I went back to her saying where do you know me from? She said: ‘You saw me in the village. You said if I don’t remove this thing it could kill me.’ I said to her but you were supposed to be in the car. I paid for the car, what happened? She said: ‘After you left, my mum asked me is it painful? I told her it wasn’t painful. We had not cooked for more than three days and I have siblings. So immediately my mum told the taxi guy to keep 5 or 10 percent but to give back the rest of the money. We went shopping and then we had dinner. And now. This thing is killing me’.”
Tragically, her health had deteriorated beyond cure. Mallum recalls: “It was already foul-smelling because when cancer breaks through the skin, bacterial infection often follows. It stuck in my mind.”
Career pivot to oncology
The incident kept him up into the early morning hours. Somewhere past midnight, he says it became the pivot that steered his career toward oncology. “My best critical time of thinking is anything after midnight, say 2-3 am,” he says. “I sat down and asked myself: who takes care of cancer? Surprisingly, my region [north-eastern Nigeria, with nearly 22 million people at the time] we didn’t have one oncology unit. We didn’t have one radiation machine.”
Mallum adds that had the young woman made the trip to Maiduguri Teaching Hospital, she would have been treated with surgery. If additional radiation therapy had been required, she would have undertaken a ten-hour journey westward to the Ahmadu Bello University Teaching Hospital in Zaria, which housed the only oncology unit in northern Nigeria, at the time.
“I realised as a doctor that I needed to contribute to this particular part of medicine because of this vast need,” he says. “That lady was the reason for me to start. The motivation comes from her; the dream it came from her.”
“The mother of oncology in Africa”
He could not specialise in oncology in Nigeria because of limited cancer treatment infrastructure. “But then,” he says. “I was praying to be taken to challenges that need me. I was looking for opportunities and was very privileged to find one in South Africa, at Stellenbosch University and Tygerberg Academic Hospital.”
He started his four-year Master of Medicine in radiation oncology at Stellenbosch University in 2014. Reflecting on his mentor, Professor Hannah Simonds, Tygerberg’s former head of clinical and radiation oncology, he beams: “Personally, I see her as the mother of oncology in Africa.”
Mallum is speaking to Spotlight in Durban, inside a small office adjoining the radiation and oncology centre at Inkosi Albert Luthuli Central Hospital, where he is a consulting oncologist. Earlier, walking along a corridor, Mallum paused to speak with a patient; bending his robust frame over the man who appeared comparatively frail. “Sawubona,” Mallum said to the man. “I will be with you soon, the rest of the team is there.”
The hospital was the research site of Mallum’s PhD at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, titled: “Comparative Analysis of Hypofractionated Versus Conventional Radiotherapy for Breast, Cervical, and Prostate Cancer in an African Setting: A Mixed-Methods Study at Inkosi Albert Luthuli Hospital.”
A PhD first
This, says Mallum, may well be the first PhD dissertation in radiotherapy and oncology completed in South Africa. “I did it because of my interest and wanting to get depth of knowledge about this topic. And along the way, I came to realise, I am the only candidate!”
Professor Mariza Vorster, head of nuclear medicine at the University of KwaZulu-Natal and Inkosi Albert Luthuli Central Hospital, who co-supervised Mallum’s thesis, tells Spotlight his PhD was the first in radiotherapy and oncology at the university, and “to the best of our knowledge, the first in this discipline in South Africa”.
Mallum explains that his research looked at whether shorter courses of radiotherapy (called hypofractionation) – which is widely used in high-income countries – can be safely implemented in sub-Saharan Africa, where patients may have additional health burdens like HIV.
Cancer patients in Africa face some of the toughest odds in the world, but the ground-breaking research of Dr Abba Aji Mallum, who is UKZN’s first PhD graduate in Radiotherapy and Oncology, offers renewed hope for improving cancer care across the continent https://t.co/8xg4kKtQF0 pic.twitter.com/D9mRrbx9lm
— UKZN’s CHS (@UKZNCHS) September 23, 2025
His research found that for prostate, breast and cervical cancer patients, hypofractionated treatment was just as effective as conventional radiotherapy, with no significant difference in survival outcomes. For example, breast cancer patients treated with hypofractionated radiotherapy had comparable five-year survival rates to those receiving conventional treatment – but at nearly half the cost.
He has published various papers on the issue, including in the journal Frontiers in Oncology in 2025. In it he writes: “Hypofractionation has potential benefits for cancer patients in low-income countries by reducing treatment duration and resource demands. However, few studies have examined the potential for higher toxicity due to the increased radiation dose per session, particularly in patients with existing health burdens like HIV.”
The study showed that hypofractionated radiotherapy delivered comparable clinical outcomes to conventional radiation therapy in patients with cervical cancer, with a treatment time of 35 days instead of 62. “So that is what motivated me,” he says. “There are a lot of implications: less waiting time before treatment, less journeys to the hospital, the patient is missing less work, less challenges that the family are facing in terms of stress.”
Durban: challenges and solutions – “cancer doesn’t sleep”
His big passion, Mallum tells Spotlight, is finding solutions for people in poor countries. In Africa, he says, South Africa and Egypt have the most radiotherapy resources. Nevertheless, waiting times in South Africa can be unacceptably high. In 2017, KwaZulu-Natal faced a cancer crisis that was detailed in a report by the South African Human Rights Commission before Parliament that year. In 2020, Daily Maverick reported that corruption around radiation machine maintenance, non-functioning machines, and a healthcare staff shortage resulted in at least 499 preventable cancer deaths in the province.
Mallum started working in Durban on the back of this crisis. He says: “When I joined the University of KwaZulu-Natal back in 2020, just pre-covid, there was a crisis of oncology in KwaZulu-Natal. So a patient would be diagnosed today, and their appointment for radiation treatment was happening six months, or one year later. And that is a time bomb. Literally, you are compromising their outcome. Because cancer doesn’t sleep, every day, every hour, every minute, every second, cancer cells replicate. Two become four, four become eight, eight becomes 16. And by the time when you see this patient, the cancer has already thrown them back, that they are not even fit for treatment.”
Mallum says that presently the province has seven state-of-the-art linear accelerator (linac) radiotherapy machines – which has capacity to perform hypofractionated radiation therapy. There are three at Inkosi Albert Luthuli Hospital, two at Addington Hospital on Durban’s beachfront, and two at Greys Hospital in Pietermaritzburg. “They are all active and working, and there are plans to get more,” he says.
What can be done about people’s long journeys to cities for radiation therapy? “So there is a plan, what they call decentralising cancer services,” he says. “For example, an oncology unit was created at Ngwelezana Hospital [in northern KwaZulu-Natal]. They are giving chemotherapy, but there is a plan that machines will be established there, too.” However, earlier this year The Zululand Observer reported that expansions at Ngwelezana Hospital’s oncology unit have been delayed.
Back home
Meanwhile, after moving to South Africa, Mallum continued conferring with colleagues back home at the University of Maiduguri Teaching Hospital, where he completed his initial medical degree. “As I started at Stellenbosch University, we had crises back home, the Boko Haram incidents,” he says. Boko Haram is a group that has been designated a terrorist organisation by the Nigerian government. The group has been responsible for a long list of terrorist attacks claiming many lives.
Sign up for free AllAfrica Newsletters
Get the latest in African news delivered straight to your inbox
Despite vast destabilisation in the area, three years ago a dream near Mallum’s heart came true when an official clinical oncology department with two linac machines opened at the University of Maiduguri Teaching Hospital. He says: “While I was doing the training at Stellenbosch, I was busy communicating with them back home, supporting them. Today as we speak, I am not there physically, but we were able to establish a cancer centre. And they have exactly the machines that we have here at [Inkosi] Albert Luthuli. They have two machines and the plan is to make it four machines, so it’s coming, bit by bit.”
A child’s vision
Medicine first struck a sense of awe in Mallum, when, as a young child, a pharmacy assistant treated his grandmother who had collapsed in agony after being stung by a scorpion.
“All night she was crying and I was crying, because she’s my grandma and she was in pain. And then the pharmacy assistant came and gave my grandma a local infiltration injection (a numbing medicine). Everything got better and finally she slept, it was just like magic. So then I said: ‘Lord, I really want to be one of those people, someone that can help the community’.”
That early vision has led him across the world. Today, Mallum is an adjunct professor of global oncology and public health at Walter Sisulu University in Mthatha, and an associate professor of radiation medicine and clinical oncology at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. He is also a former research fellow at Johns Hopkins University in the United States. Going forward, he plans to lead clinical trials on implementing hypofractionated radiotherapy as a standard of care across Africa.
Speaking to Spotlight, Mallum says: “Sickness is not only cured by medicine. It has a mental part. It has a spiritual part. So I believe that just treating patients but without passion, you are still lacking. I see a kind of opportunity in my way of approaching patients. I create time to listen to them. If I am able to make one patient smile, I feel satisfied internally and those things motivate me.”
At the University of KwaZulu-Natal, more PhD students in radiotherapy and oncology are expected to follow in his footsteps. He says he anticipates co-supervising at least two, soon.
Mallum lives in Musgrave in Durban with his wife and their two sons.