10/13/2026
Meet the Sakerette, Class of 1987, who came out of Saker Baptist College, one of Cameroon's pioneering secondary schools for girls.
Meet the student who joined the first cohort admitted to the newly established University of Buea in 1993.
Meet the Commonwealth Scholar who earned a PhD at the University of Aberdeen by studying the fungi that partner with the roots of a Central African forest vegetable.
Meet the lecturer who came back to her university in 2008 and began a climb through Admissions and Records that would last more than a decade.
Meet the professor whose research runs from forest fungi to oil-palm disease, from plantain to the biodiversity of Cameroon's ecosystems.
Meet the woman who, in August 2021, became the first female Registrar in the history of the University of Buea.
Her name is Professor Eneke Esoeyang Tambe Bechem.
The Struggle
Her story, as the record allows it to be told, begins in a school with a purpose. Saker Baptist College in Limbe, formerly Victoria, is an all-girls school founded in 1962 and counted among the country's pioneering secondary schools for girls.
She belongs to its Class of 1987 and is celebrated as a Sakerette success story. Beyond that, the public record falls quiet. Her date of birth, her family background and her early childhood are not reliably documented, and this profile will not invent what the record does not confirm.
Every institution begins untidily, and in 1993 the University of Buea was only beginning. She was among the first cohort of students admitted to the newly established university, and there were no long-settled traditions to lean on. Academic culture, administrative routines and campus life were still being worked out by the very people living inside them. To study at a young university is to help write its story while you are still a character in it. She went on to earn both a bachelor's and a master's degree there.
Then came the distance. In September 2000 she began a PhD in Plant and Soil Science at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland, supported by a Commonwealth Scholarship, and she would not finish until November 2004.
That is four years of research far from home. Her work took on a demanding question: the mycorrhizal status of Gnetum species in Cameroon, a forest plant valued as a leafy vegetable across Central Africa. She examined the diversity of the fungi that live with its roots to support efforts to domesticate it.
When she came home to the University of Buea in 2008, she took on two demanding worlds at once. One was the classroom and the laboratory, where teaching and research claim constant attention.
The other was administration, and she began serving in the Admissions structure the same year. Science and administration rarely share the same hours kindly, and doing both well calls for a particular kind of stamina.
There was also the weight of what stood at the top of that ladder. The Registrar's office had never been held by a woman. A first carries its own pressure, because every step is noticed and every decision begins to look like precedent.
The Rise
Her rise followed a pattern that is simple and demanding: learn the work, serve in it, then lead it.
Within the university's Admissions and Records structure, the record is exact.
She was Acting Head of Service for Admissions from January 2008 to January 2011, Head of Service for Admissions from January 2011 to January 2018, and Head of Division for Admissions and Records from January 2018 until August 2021. That is thirteen years of close contact with the machinery students depend on. Admissions decide who enters. Records preserve what happens afterwards.
An error at any point along that path can cost a student dearly.
All the while, her scientific reputation kept growing. She is a professor of plant science and plant biotechnology in the Department of Plant Science, Faculty of Science, at the University of Buea. Her research centres on the relationships between plants and microbes, especially mycorrhizal fungi, and reaches into plant ecology, plant pathology, biodiversity, ethnobotany and sustainable agriculture across Cameroon's rainforests, savannas and plantations.
The range is striking. Her work on Gnetum and its fungal partners, including phosphorus nutrition and the production of inoculum, speaks to the domestication of a valued forest species.
She has contributed to international research on the diversity and structure of ectomycorrhizal fungi in African forests and savannas, including collaborative papers that have drawn hundreds of citations. She has studied the ethnomycology and ethnobotany of Cameroonian forests such as Kilum-Ijim and Takamanda, and the plant diseases that threaten crops, from Fusarium oxysporum f. sp. elaeidis in oil palm to fungal pathogens of plantain and tomato.
With dozens of peer-reviewed publications, she has built a record that supports biodiversity conservation and the sustainable use of tropical species.
Many people master one world; she learned two. The researcher's habit of testing evidence and the administrator's habit of keeping faith with procedure are different disciplines, and she practised both. Students and colleagues describe a tutor who is strict but fair and approachable, and her leadership is associated with rigour, accountability and a commitment to excellence and inclusion.
Then, on 20 August 2021, the pattern reached its peak. Presidential Decree No. 2021/437 appointed Professor Eneke Esoeyang Tambe Bechem Registrar of the University of Buea, succeeding Prof. Ernest Lytia Molua. She was installed around 26 August, and with that she became the first woman to hold the office in the institution's history.
Consider the arc. She entered the university with its pioneering students. She crossed to Scotland for a doctorate. She came home, taught, researched, served, and rose through the very offices she would one day lead. The appointment was not a leap across a gap. It was the arrival of a journey built from years of experience.
The Impact
The Registrar's office is the memory of a university. As Registrar, she oversees institutional governance, student records and admissions, regulatory compliance and coordination among the executive leadership.
The office handles transcripts, attestations and certificates for students who meet the university's requirements, and it may represent the Vice-Chancellor at meetings or official engagements. She has also represented the university in national and international engagements, including the 2020–2021 graduation of the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences Cameroon.
Why does that matter? Because a transcript or certificate is never just paper. It opens doors to employment, professional applications and further studies, and employers and institutions rely on it to verify a graduate's qualifications. When records are accurate, years of a student's effort can be proven wherever they are needed. When they are not, those years can be questioned. A Registrar who knows Admissions and Records from the inside understands this, and she remains visibly active in the university's calendar, from matriculation to graduation schedules.
Her vision reaches beyond records.
In the university's 30th-anniversary magazine, she spoke about the need for a more comprehensive database of graduates, one that shows where they are and what they do. The idea is practical and generous. A university that knows its graduates can invite them to mentor students, create internship opportunities, share professional expertise and suggest ideas for improving academic programmes. Her own life is the proof: a pioneering student who returned to serve.
Her legacy can be seen in three strands. The first is science: a research record in plant–microbe interactions and tropical biodiversity that serves agriculture and the environment.
The second is service: years in Admissions and Records that gave her a working knowledge of the processes students rely on. The third is history: the first woman to serve as Registrar of the University of Buea. Together they show that excellence in research and excellence in administration are not rivals. They can live in one career, and one life.
For girls walking the corridors of schools like Saker today, and for any young woman considering a career in science, education or public administration, her journey offers a clear lesson. Paths do not have to be narrow.
She is bilingual in English and French, a scientist who became an administrator without leaving science behind, and a reminder that experience gained patiently, over time, is one of the strongest foundations for leadership.
Professor Eneke Esoeyang Tambe Bechem is proof that the people who build institutions are not always the people who founded them.
Sometimes they are the students who walked in during the earliest years, learned what the institution could teach, went out to learn more, and came back to carry the work forward.
From Sakerette to pioneering student, from Commonwealth Scholar to Head of Division, and from Head of Division to the first female Registrar of the University of Buea, her career has become part of the continuing story of one of Cameroon's leading universities. Cameroon should know her name, and the young people now entering the university she helped pioneer should know her story.
Professor Eneke Esoeyang Tambe Bechem: a scientist, an educator, an administrator, and a woman who made history.
