This essay explores the early work of Suzanne Comhaire-Sylvain in Congo. Despite Comhaire-Sylvain being renowned as Haiti’s first woman anthropologist, her life and extensive scholar-ship in Africa have been largely overlooked. Given her unique positionality and formal training in Europe during a period when ethnology relied on empire to assert its utility to the state, Comhaire-Sylvain’s work unfolded along colonial fault lines, a dimension this essay seeks to tease out.