Joyce Ashuntantang - A Woman on the Go!

Originally published in Summit Magazine

When one talks with Joyce Ashuntantang, one is tempted to think she has lived for a hundred years. That is because Joyce has always been on the go. She has studied in Cameroon, Britain and the USA. She is widely traveled, France, Morocco, Ivory Coast, Nigeria, Mali, Benin, Senegal, Switzerland, Belgium etc. Some know her in Cameroon as the star actress of the Yaounde University Theatre, flame players and the golden days of CTV/ CRTV. Her talent and beauty shown on stage as she dramatized poems and plays on late Kwasen Gwan’gwa’s Focus on Art.

Some of her memorable plays on stage and TV include Seminal Dregs by Thomas Gwan’gwaa. In this play she starred as Pamela the young university student who is raped by her father’s friend, Mr. Ngange, acted by the late Joseph Ndanji. Joyce acted this role so well that one day on the streets of Yaounde, a child pointing to her, shouted in French “Voila la fille qu’on avait violée!”

Another memorable performance was in her role as the revolutionary Mboysi in Bole Butake’s Survivors. Yet, most students in the mid eighties in the North West and Southwest provinces seem never to have forgotten her impeccable appearance as Desdemona in Shakespeare’s Othello. This led the late Bate Besong to report in Cameroon Tribune in 1984 that “Joyce Ashuntantang has kneaded for herself a contingent of worshippers here in Bamenda”. Then after a two-year stay in Britain, she re-appeared on the Cameroon scene in 1993 to play the role of Fatou in Victor Epie Ngome’s What God has put Asunder.
But she is remembered more during this period as the magazine editor of the Herald Newspaper, famous for her agony aunt column, “Auntie Maggie” and “Namondo’s diary.” As she once recalled, “I still remember those evenings when I would stroll from the Herald offices to the Cameroon Post offices, via Liberty Spot bar, to chat and get the news of the day. In those days, you were sure to bump into a lively political debate about some aspect of the Anglophone problem or fierce disagreements on whether Charlie Ndichia (“the rolling stone that gathers moss”) had actually introduced the English language TV newscast with the words "And now lies (instead of "live") from CRTV. Those days where energizing” Recently, Joyce has made headlines as the scriptwriter and co-producer of the video-film Potent secrets in which she starred as Matilda alongside Dr. Godfrey Tangwa.

Today, Joyce Ashuntantang who declared in Cameroon Life Magazine in 1990 that “acting is my life”, is now an Assistant Professor of English in the United States. After defending her PhD dissertation at the City University of New York titled "Landscaping postcoloniality the dissemination of Anglophone Cameroon literature", she joined the English Department at the University of Connecticut at Storrs/Hartford. One of her joys is the fact that she has been able to introduce Anglophone Cameroon Literature to her students. She has taught Linus Asong’s Crown of Thorns a couple of times and plans on adding another Anglophone writer to the list.

Readers should however rest assured that Joyce has not abandoned the flamboyance and passion of the stage and film for the drabness and formality of academia. She is still very much involved in those activities that made her a household name some 20 years ago as a star actress in Cameroon. Joyce does poetry dramatizations in different fora especially on university campuses where she is usually invited as a guest speaker. Due to her dramatic abilities and oratory, she is a highly sought after host for important cultural occasions in the African community in the  USA,  - She has  hosted many events including the pioneer Camwread (Cameroon Writers and Readers) conference in Maryland, the second annual Miss Africa USA pageant in Atlanta,  the Minnesota African Women Association Conference in Minnesota, and the launching of the African Cultural center in New Jersey. In the Cameroon community, she often dumbfounds her audience with a dramatic recitation of the Cameroon national anthem which often draws the audience’s attention to the words of the anthem often lost in the singing. She is equally a consultant to many Cameroonian/African creative artists in the USA.

One would think that with a full time university teaching job, taking care of her two boys (Ako III and Tanjong) who are avid soccer players and her numerous activities, Joyce will be satisfied. No!  Joyce founded EduArt, a not-for-profit organization which seeks to use art as a medium for education. It is thanks to EduArt that she is now able to pursue one of her pet projects - that of promoting Anglophone Cameroon literature which is suffering from acute under-exposure and a lack of viable publishing outlets. In 2007, EduArt launched three literary awards for Anglophone writers worth half a million Francs CFA – the Victor E. Musinga Award for Drama, the Jane and Rufus Blanshard Award for fiction and Bate Besong Award for Poetry. Ngong Kum won the first award for poetry for his poetry collection Walls of Agony. The award ceremony will take place in Cameroon in June.

A recent glitch in her life was the death in March 2007 of Bate Besong, Kwassen Gwan'gwaa and Hilarious Ambe, three individuals who played significant roles in her life. Joyce consequently traveled to Cameroon to pay her last respects to her fallen mentors and friend.  But as Joyce points out “I have put this tragic occurrence in perspective; remember I lost both of my parents in a car crash in 1986. You allow the grieving process to run its course and then you move on”.

So what is Joyce working on now? “Well I always have multiple projects going on; I am producing a short film on domestic violence with students from the University of Connecticut human rights club, a club I founded. I equally just finished co-editing a tribute volume of poetry for Bate Besong. I am organizing an after school diversity mixer for kids at the Goodwin Elementary school, Storrs, in March. Also watch out for my talk show ‘Opinions with Dr. J’ coming to a TV near you.”

Without doubt Dr. Joyce Ashuntantang is a woman on the go, determined to conquer mountains and break barriers that not only stand in her way but also those that have kept literature and arts in Anglophone Cameroon in chains. We have definitely not seen or heard the last of her yet.

Comments

[prophetess ELIZABETH foncham Campbell]

i mistakenly post my comment without info
thanks.