She stepped into Radio Cameroon when the airwaves rarely carried a woman’s unscripted voice. Between 1969 and 1971 she honed her craft at the BBC in London, mastering studio management and field recording with the quiet precision of a sculptor learning stone.
Returning to Yaoundé, she declined to be a vessel for another’s words. She became a producer and carved space for others with Calling the Women, a program that turned silence into conversation.
For three decades she was the voice that closed the day on CRTV. At 9:30 pm, her “good night” became a national benediction, as steady as dusk. Her “Three Breaths” method for broadcast poise is still taught at ASMAC and in journalism schools across Africa.
The state recognized her devotion with CRTV’s 30-Year Long Service Medal, the Ministry of Communication Distinguished Service Award in 1988, and in 2015, her investiture as Knight of the Cameroon Order of Merit by the President of the Republic, among the nation’s highest civilian honors. She also received CAMYOSFOP’s Lifetime Achievement Award for excellence in journalism and the Presbyterian Church of Cameroon’s Pillar of Legacy Award, honoring a faith that never flickered.
Teaching beyond walls
Her classroom had no walls. Through Calling the Women, she carried lessons on law, health, and civic rights down dirt roads and into kitchens where radios sat like honored guests.
At CRTV and ASMAC she shaped generations of broadcasters, among them Eric Chinje and Comfort Mussa, teaching them to speak with clarity and conscience.
Through the Trailblazer Scholarships she sent more than 67 girls to secondary school and university, including delegations to the University of Virginia’s Young Women Leaders Program.
“Poise is deliberateness. The mic hears your smile. Say their names.”
With those words she taught a nation how to listen.
Voice into scaffolding
She turned voice into scaffolding. She founded Kongadzem, Yaoundé’s first English-speaking women’s association, and nurtured it into CAWNA, a constellation of more than 43 associations across the Northwest and Center Regions.
She carried Cameroon’s story to the UN Women’s Conferences in Nairobi in 1985 and Beijing in 1995, then returned to translate global charters into intimate radio dialects her listeners could live by.
Through Kongadzem she forged bridges across oceans. With the National Black Women's Project in Atlanta, she brought On Becoming A Woman to Cameroonian airwaves, reshaping its lessons on dignity, selfhood, and reproductive health for girls who had never heard their bodies spoken of with reverence. With the International Women’s Health Coalition in New York, she waged quiet campaigns against HIV/AIDS and other health crises, turning pamphlets into programs and policy into village workshops that saved lives one broadcast at a time.
The Shemka Foundation was established by her children to honor her and her husband, Simon Shemka Shang. Its Quality Health Care Unit began as a two-room maternity ward and grew into a 25-bed hospital that now welcomes more than 600 children into the world each year.
Her provision store and poultry farm became blueprints for women’s economic cooperatives, proof of her conviction: “The microphone gives you dignity. The cash book gives you choice.”
Wife, mother, mother to all
For more than 50 years she and Simon Shemka Shang kept a covenant of iron and tenderness. “He was her strongest critic but most passionate admirer.” Together they birthed seven and raised six children. Their lineage now numbers 15 grandchildren and 7 great-grandchildren.
As Elder and CWF President at PCC Bastos, she shepherded a congregation. But her mothering refused the boundaries of blood. She sheltered ESTIC students, penned monthly letters to scholars abroad, and became Ma Olive Shang to thousands who believed her nightly “good night” was meant for them alone.
Her home moved to the same rhythm as her studio: “God first, family second, nation third.” It was the first campus of Kongadzem, the first boardroom of the Shemka Foundation, and the first refuge for women escaping violence.