Marie-Thérèse Assiga Ahanda
Quick Facts
Biography
Marie-Thérèse Catherine Atangana Assiga Ahanda is a Cameroonian novelist and chemist and the paramount chief of the Ewondo people. Ahanda is the daughter of Charles Atangana—paramount chief of the Ewondo and Bane peoples under the German and French colonial regimes—by his second wife, Julienne Ngonoa. Ahanda is married and has four children and several grandchildren.
Ahanda worked for a few years in the science department of the University of Yaoundé. She then moved to the Republic of the Congo with her husband. They returned to Cameroon, and Ahanda was selected as a delegate to the National Assembly of Cameroon, a position she held from 1983 to 1988. Ahanda became the Ewondo paramount chief sometime before 1996. In December 2000, she began the renovation of her father's palace at Efoulan, Yaoundé, a project that would cost an estimated 150,000,000 francs CFA.
Ahanda's writings include a novel, Sociétés africaines et 'High Society': Petite ethnologie de l'arrivisme (African societies and 'High Society': A small ethnology of ambitiousness), published in 1978, and Je suis raciste (I am a racist), published in 1982.