Batuo's world

Dreamer and Doer

By Niyi Osundare (Originally published in Newswatch Magazine, Monday, September 08, 2008)         

Joyce Ashuntantang, actress, writer, scholar, and founder of EduArt, organises the first Literary Award Night in Anglophone Cameroon

When, in March this year, Joyce Ashuntantang was telling me about EduArt, her pet project, her voice throbbed with so palpable an enthusiasm that I could feel it on the telephone. EduArt, she went on, is a US-based non-profit organisation whose main objective is the promotion of art as an educational and cultural tool. And this organisation is no respecter of artificial divides, as its ambition and functional trajectory cut across national boundaries, and transcend the highest mountains and widest oceans. EduArt is as involved in organising after-school diversity programmes for elementary school children in the United States as it is in prosecuting book drives for university libraries in Africa.

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!”