EDUCATION is the foundation of ANY Nation.

Let’s come together and build a better nation through educating our young children, ensuring they have what it takes to secure a lifestyle and help towards poverty alleviation.

OROKO Cultural Celebrations

Cultural awareness does not only boast cooperation and coexistence, it directly creates the occasion for togetherness and mutual respect for our share values and principles within the OROKO communities.

Authentic OROKO Dishes

There’s no greater joy than sharing an authentic meal with friends, family, well-wishers and even strangers. The Oroko people are known for their rich traditions and hospitality.

Hhhmmmm… Good Appetite!

Before any discussion surrounding the history of the Oroko people can take shape, it is important to clarify that the use of the term, Oroko, to denote an ethnic group, is very recent. It was in the decade following Cameroon’s independence that the name Oroko was adopted to characterize the people occupying most of the Ndian and Meme divisions of Cameroon.

These people had previously been referred to, mostly by people outside the ethnic group, as Balondo or Bakundu during the contact-with-the-west and colonial eras (see for example, Comber, 1879). This misrepresentation is largely ascribed to the relative exposure that the Balondo and the Bakundu had gained with both colonial administrations and the newly created government of Cameroon .

In the Ndian division, the groups that immediately became known as Oroko include the Balondo ba Diko, Balondo ba Nanga, Bakoko, Balue, Batanga, the Bima, part of the Ekombe, and the Ngolo. In the Meme division, the people who came to be known as Oroko include the Bakundu, part of the Ekombe, and the Mbonge. Over time, the group has also come to include, albeit with caution, the Barombi, Isangele and Korup.

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Our Cultural Heritage

Stay at home when sick

You are treasured and a fundamental pillar within your community. Join hand to promote the positive values you continue to hold as an OROKO child.

Not everything about the origins and culture of the Oroko can be fully discussed in such a time and space-constrained context. Our forgone account of our origins, as a people, are not in any way exhaustive. It is clear that although there exist several notions and opinions on the cultural unity of the people, there is no gainsaying that at some point in history, the people known today as Oroko came from a single ancestry and location, the same which may have been shared with people we do not consider to be Oroko today. There is a probability, although needing adequate historical and archeological proof, that the Mbongo/Nambongo figure was either historically true or an ideological/mythical symbol of unity for the so-called people of the Banokko invasion. Within Oroko communities, as it is with other so-called Sawa communities, the Mbongo aspect has survived in the names of localities and persons. For example, localities like Mbongo, Ngongo, Bobiongo, Lombongi, etc, echo a form of the Mbongo in Oroko territory. The name itself may be a contraction of mboka and Ngo, that is land and leopard to yield Land of the Leopard-Man. These people, as Ardener has sought to explain, may be the same that earlier writers like Pacheco Pereira, Dapper and others referred to as Kalbongo/Calbongo, Caaboo, or Ambozes.

There is little doubt that, given these accounts (both from oral history and written records) as well as the sphere of Ambozean and Kalbongean control, the Oroko of today constituted a part of these once fearsome nations on the Rio del Rey and the Cameroons River. Every indication here suggests that the Oroko did not originate from afar. They most likely first lived in an area close to the Cameroon Mountain as the Batekka ba Mongo (Hill) and then migrated towards the east side of the Rio del Rey as the Batekka ba Mallalle. From this point, they left in different successions, possibly beginning with the Ngolo, who, Knutson says, had become antagonistic to the Batanga and the other peoples around them by the 19th century. The timeline for these migrations cannot be ascertained but historical records show that between the 1500s and the 1700s, the people now known as Oroko were still settled in the slave trading Rio del Rey estuary. By the 1800s however, the Oroko had either displaced or absorbed the Barombi who lived in the Rombi (Rumpi) Mountains, the Batom (Bafaw) and the Balong peoples of Ndian and Meme, establishing themselves in their current location.

I am inclined to believe that servitude in the days of old was mostly not a marker of difference, as Aja Oro would have us believe. Eye-witness accounts, as cited above, make mention of internal slavery within tribes and villages, althought Knutson tells us that the Bateka people chiefly traded in slaves from the interior of Biafra. Nevertheless, there is still evidence that in later days, i.e after the official banning of the transatlantic slave trade, people kept servants with whom they shared the same ancestry. And there is no way of saying that this was a new practice, especially when we consider that the Kalbongo in Pacheco’s time would readily sell their own children among themselves as a form of punishment. Hence, it is not enough to use slavery or servitude to ascertain whether a master was ethnically different from the slave. By presenting this brief summary of our beginnings, it is my hope that I have brought our people closer to their self awareness and have given them the opportunity to go deeper in their roots.