We use cookies on this website. By continuing to use this site without changing your cookie settings, you agree that you are happy to accept our privacy policy and for us to access our cookies on your device.
Transcript/Script((PLAYBOOK SLUG: CAMEROON PROFESSOR CALIFORNIA
HEADLINE: Cameroon Professor Finds Refuge at California University
TEASER: Elisabeth Ayuk-Etang was threatened by separatist violence at home
PUBLISHED AT: Wednesday, 03/22/2023 at 06:12 EDT
BYLINE: Genia Dulot
CONTRIBUTOR:
DATELINE: Santa Barbara, California
VIDEOGRAPHER: Genia Dulot
PRODUCER: Jason Godman
SCRIPT EDITORS: Stearns, wpm
VIDEO SOURCE: VOA
PLATFORMS: WEB __ TV _X_ RADIO _X_
TRT: 3:24
VID APPROVED BY: pcd
TYPE: TVPKG
EDITOR NOTES:
((INTRO:))
[[A university professor threatened by separatist violence in Cameroon is now in Southern California, sharing with her students the impact of armed conflict on the environment and on women. Genia Dulot has our story from Santa Barbara.]]
((NARRATOR))
Elisabeth Ayuk-Etang makes a traditional dish of eru greens and yam flour for her family dinner. They are a long way from their last home in Cameroon’s southwestern city of Buea, where Ayuk-Etang chaired the university English Department. That work made her a target in the conflict between Anglophone separatists and government forces in the largely French-speaking Central African country.
((Elisabeth Ayuk-Etang, Professor))
“Having a lot of threats, phone calls, threatening me, if you continue to teach, they will come for you, especially as a chair of your department.”
((NARRATOR))
She was shot in the wrist in 2019. Her husband was kidnapped twice. Raising children in that instability, their lives changed during a virtual mentoring call with University of California professor Kum-Kum Bhavnani.
((Kum-Kum Bhavnani, Professor))
“One day, I heard a lot of sound, I could hardly hear Elisabeth. I said: ‘What’s going on? What’s that noise?’ And then when she said to me: ‘Oh, those are gunshots.’ ‘What do you mean they’re gunshots?’ ‘Well, there’s a civil war here.’
((NARRATOR))
Bhavnani helped Ayuk-Etang apply to the Institute of International Education’s Scholar Rescue Fund, which sponsors fellowships for threatened and displaced scholars at partner schools worldwide. She and her family came here to the University of California at Santa Barbara, where her lectures focus on militarism and the harm that armed conflict inflicts on the environment and on women.
((Elisabeth Ayuk-Etang, Professor))
“Women are mothers of those child soldiers, because you have young kids 9 to 16, even 18 or 20, who are all recruited into the army of these secessionists and even the state military. Women are mothers to all those military people, who are fighting and being killed. Women are wives to the husbands who are being kidnapped as well as being killed. Women are being raped.”
((NARRATOR))
Graduate Student Natasha Moore is researching the historically African American Rondo neighborhood in her native Minnesota. She says Ayuk-Etang’s course on African history and culture adds important context.
((Natasha Moore, Graduate Student))
“It’s almost like you’re able to trace how the plantation, Southern plantation culture was brought up to Minnesota to shape Rondo. And it’s that culture, those values, those morals, those ways of being in the world, that has allowed Rondo to still persist in spite of the state-sanctioned violence. And if you understand a Southern plantation culture, then you understand an African culture, because that is sort of like a continuation of African homestead, and a black neighborhood, sort of the same institutions.”
((NARRATOR))
Ayuk-Etang says living outside the conflict in Cameroon has allowed her to complete a new book of poetry.
((Elisabeth Ayuk-Etang, Professor))
“Walk with me. Peaceful villages now left in smoke etched by a labyrinth of bullets. Nagasaki again. This time 50 thousand lives lost in five years in NOSO, Northwest - Southwest.”
((Genia Dulot for VOA News, Santa Barbara, California))
NewsML Media TopicsArts, Culture, Entertainment and Media
NetworkVOA
Location (dateline)Santa Barbara, California
BylineGenia Dulot
Brand / Language ServiceVoice of America - English
