Beyond “These Graffi People”: The Sako Doctrine and Ambazonia’s National-Unity Imperative

We are many communities, but one people. No community’s dignity can be secured by diminishing another. Our diversity is not an obstacle to Ambazonian nationhood; it is the human foundation upon which a just, federal, secure, prosperous, and united nation must be built.

By Hans Ngala
Revised and expanded with additions from The Independentist News Editorial Desk

Editor’s Note: This article builds upon Hans Ngala’s original commentary and recasts it within an Ambazonian national-unity framework. The expanded edition incorporates what the Independentist News Editorial Board describes as the “Sako Doctrine”—an editorial formulation derived from Dr. Samuel Ikome Sako’s publicly expressed principles of national unity, equal citizenship, protected communities, federalism, and opposition to regional supremacy. The term should not be interpreted as the title of a formally promulgated government policy unless subsequently adopted or authorized as such.

When Resilience Is Misrepresented

It is no secret that people from the Grassfields counties of Southern Cameroons/Ambazonia—often broadly described as “Graffi people”—have sometimes been treated with suspicion, resentment, or outright hostility. Their mobility, commercial success, cultural confidence, and capacity to establish themselves wherever opportunity arises have too frequently been portrayed as aggression rather than recognized as resilience.

Life across much of the Grassfields has historically demanded initiative. Formal employment has been limited, state support unreliable, and money difficult to obtain. Many families survived through farming, trading, craftsmanship, education, apprenticeships, and migration. From an early age, children learned that survival depended upon discipline, hard work, cooperation, and the ability to create opportunities where none had been provided.

Wherever Grassfields people settled, they cultivated land, opened businesses, entered the professions, educated their children, joined churches and community associations, and contributed to the communities that received them. Their success should be understood as part of Ambazonia’s collective productive strength—not converted into an excuse for regional suspicion.

Celebrating the Culture While Distrusting the People

The toghu, rooted in the cultural traditions of the Grassfields, has become an internationally recognizable expression of identity and pride. It is worn at major ceremonies, cultural events, diplomatic gatherings, and international celebrations. People from different backgrounds embrace it as a symbol of collective heritage.

Yet some of the people whose communities produced this cultural inheritance have been subjected to stereotypes within the same society that celebrates their cultural products. This contradiction reveals a troubling habit: admiring what a people create while remaining uncomfortable with the people themselves. A nation cannot claim a community’s art as national heritage while treating members of that community as permanent outsiders.

The toghu should unite Ambazonians. It should remind the nation that what originates within one community can become a source of pride for everyone without being detached from the dignity of the people who created it.

The Conflict Must Not Become an Ethnic Indictment

The present conflict has intensified inherited suspicions. Grassfields people have sometimes been collectively blamed for political decisions, armed activities, migration patterns, or economic competition. Such accusations are unjust and dangerous.

No county, cultural group, or population should be held collectively responsible for the decisions of particular leaders, political organizations, armed groups, or individuals. Collective guilt is the language through which prejudice prepares the ground for exclusion and violence.

However, defending Grassfields people must not require portraying them as more hardworking, welcoming, tolerant, or deserving than other Ambazonians. Every Ambazonian community possesses its own history of enterprise, sacrifice, hospitality, courage, and cultural achievement. The dignity of one community cannot be secured by diminishing another.

A History of Cooperation, Not Isolation

The history of Southern Cameroons demonstrates what cooperation among communities can accomplish. Grassfields farmers, traders, teachers, transporters, clergy, professionals, and civil servants helped sustain the commercial and institutional life of coastal and plantation communities. Coastal ports, plantations, industries, schools, towns, and markets, in turn, created employment and trading opportunities for families from across the territory.

Bamenda, Buea, Victoria, Tiko, Kumba, Mamfe, and other centers did not develop as isolated ethnic enclaves. Their growth resulted from the movement, labor, knowledge, enterprise, and investment of people from many communities.

Families were formed across cultural boundaries. Students attended schools outside their ancestral areas. Traders transported food and goods from rural farms to urban markets. Teachers, nurses, doctors, engineers, plantation workers, clergy, civil servants, and entrepreneurs served communities far from their places of origin. This circulation of people and skills did not weaken Southern Cameroons. It helped create its interconnected social and economic fabric.

Bamenda’s importance as a major English-speaking commercial, educational, and cultural center should therefore be celebrated alongside Buea’s constitutional and intellectual importance, Victoria and Tiko’s maritime and industrial potential, Kumba’s commercial vitality, Mamfe’s historic gateway role, and the agricultural, cultural, and strategic contributions of every county. No city needs to become smaller for another to become important.

Freedom Cannot Reproduce Internal Prejudice

Ambazonia cannot demand freedom from external domination while reproducing internal prejudice. Words such as “Graffi,” “Bayangi,” “Bakweri,” “Bamenda people,” or “coastal people” must never become political weapons used to assign collective guilt, question citizenship, or exclude people from opportunity, leadership, residence, or national participation.

Cultural descriptions are not inherently offensive. They become dangerous when used to reduce complex human beings to hostile stereotypes or to suggest that ancestry determines loyalty, competence, or entitlement.

The conflict has displaced families across county and cultural boundaries. Grassfields families have sought safety in coastal and forest communities. People from coastal and forest communities have lived, studied, traded, worshipped, and raised families throughout the Grassfields.

Across the national territory, citizens have experienced killings, imprisonment, burned communities, displacement, interrupted education, economic destruction, and family separation. This shared suffering should deepen solidarity—not become a competition over which region has endured or contributed more.

Beyond “Northwest” and “Southwest”

The Ambazonian national project must transcend the administrative labels “Northwest” and “Southwest,” inherited from La République du Cameroun’s territorial system. These labels have encouraged the false impression that Ambazonia consists of two regional blocs negotiating an uneasy coexistence.

Ambazonians are not merely Northwesterners and Southwesterners. They are citizens of diverse counties, LGAs, cultural communities, towns, villages, and traditional jurisdictions joined by a common territory, historical experience, constitutional inheritance, and responsibility for building a shared future.

The national conversation must therefore move beyond the binary politics of regional balancing. The question should not be whether power belongs to the Northwest or Southwest. The question should be how constitutional authority can be distributed so that every citizen enjoys equal national rights while every community retains meaningful protection against domination.

Confidence Must Be Accompanied by Responsibility

Grassfields people should remain unbroken by prejudice, but they should not become indifferent to the legitimate concerns of host communities. Confidence must be accompanied by respect. Freedom of movement must coexist with lawful land tenure. Economic success should create partnerships, employment, and shared prosperity rather than deepen resentment.

Political representation must be equitable. Land transactions must be lawful, transparent, and properly documented. Traditional institutions must be respected. Local languages, customs, sacred sites, and community heritage must be protected.

These safeguards should apply equally throughout Ambazonia. A Grassfields person living along the coast must respect the lawful institutions and heritage of the host community. A coastal citizen living in the Grassfields must receive the same protection, dignity, and freedom to pursue a lawful livelihood.

National unity does not require cultural uniformity. It requires reciprocal respect under a common constitutional order.

The Sako Doctrine: An Editorial Formulation for One Nation and Equal Communities

The national principle advanced in this article is reinforced by what the Independentist News Editorial desk describes as the Sako Doctrine. The term is used here as an editorial formulation derived from Dr. Samuel Ikome Sako’s publicly expressed national-unity principles—not as a claim that a formally promulgated doctrine bearing this title has already been issued.

As formulated here, the Sako Doctrine holds that Ambazonia must be governed as one federal nation composed of equal citizens and protected communities—not as a permanent struggle between Northwest and Southwest, Grassfields and coastal peoples, or indigenous residents and internal migrants.

No county, cultural group, political organization, liberation faction, or regional bloc should be permitted to claim ownership of Ambazonia or impose its numerical, economic, military, or political strength upon another. The nation belongs equally to all Ambazonians.

This formulation reconciles two principles that are sometimes incorrectly presented as opposites: equal national citizenship and meaningful community protection. Every Ambazonian must possess the right to live, work, study, invest, worship, and participate lawfully anywhere within the national territory. At the same time, freedom of movement cannot become a license for unlawful land acquisition, demographic intimidation, cultural erasure, or political domination of host communities.

Federalism must serve as the constitutional bridge between these principles. National citizenship should protect individual rights, while county governments and empowered LGAs safeguard local institutions, lawful land tenure, cultural heritage, and meaningful community authority.

The doctrine rejects regional supremacy in every form. Bamenda cannot secure its prosperity by weakening Buea. Buea cannot exercise national leadership by excluding Bamenda. Neither the Grassfields nor the coastal, forest, plantation, border, and riverine communities can protect their future by marginalizing one another.

Their dignity, security, and prosperity are mutually dependent.

Unity Must Be Reflected in National Institutions This editorial formulation of the Sako Doctrine must be more than a slogan. It should be visible in the design and conduct of public institutions.

National investment, political representation, public administration, security institutions, universities, infrastructure, and economic opportunities must reflect Ambazonia’s territorial and cultural diversity. No community should have to surrender its identity to prove its patriotism. No citizen should be treated as a foreigner because of ancestry, accent, birthplace, or county of origin.

Appointments should be based primarily upon competence and integrity, but national institutions must never become the preserve of one county, faction, or cultural network. Recruitment systems should be transparent, geographically inclusive, and protected from nepotism.

Universities, hospitals, industries, government agencies, transportation systems, and cultural institutions should be distributed according to a coherent national-development strategy rather than concentrated as rewards for political loyalty.

The federal constitutional coordination role of Buea, the commercial energy of Bamenda and Kumba, the maritime potential of Victoria and Tiko, the gateway importance of Mamfe, and the productive assets of every county must operate as parts of one integrated national system.

Equal Citizenship and Community Protection

The governing principle must be unmistakable: no Ambazonian should be treated as a stranger anywhere within Ambazonia because of ancestry, accent, county, or cultural identity. At the same time, no host community should fear political exclusion, cultural erasure, unlawful land acquisition, demographic domination, or economic marginalization. Equal citizenship and community protection are not competing doctrines.

Citizenship must guarantee freedom of movement, residence, enterprise, education, worship, and political participation throughout the country. Federalism, county governments, empowered LGAs, and independent courts must simultaneously protect legitimate community authority, customary institutions, cultural heritage, and lawful land rights. Where disputes arise, they should be resolved by law—not by stereotypes, mob pressure, political favoritism, or ethnic mobilization.

One Nation Without Forced Uniformity

There can be no viable Ambazonia without the Grassfields, just as there can be no viable Ambazonia without its coastal, forest, border, plantation, and riverine communities. The nation requires the enterprise of its commercial centers, the productivity of its agricultural communities, the strategic value of its coastline, the creativity of its cultural traditions, and the knowledge and capital of its diaspora.

The future cannot be built around “these Graffi people,” “those coastal people,” or any other language of separation. It must be built upon a shared national doctrine:

One nation without regional supremacy; equal citizenship without cultural erasure; protected communities without internal exclusion; federalism without fragmentation; and unity without forced uniformity.

Ambazonia will not become united by pretending that mistrust does not exist. It will become united by confronting prejudice honestly, correcting misinformation, protecting equal citizenship, respecting host communities, and building institutions that prevent any group from dominating another.

Under this editorial formulation of the Sako Doctrine, derived from Dr. Sako’s publicly expressed national-unity principles, no county, cultural group, political faction, or liberation organization may become greater than the nation.

We are many communities, but one people. No community’s dignity can be secured by diminishing another. Our diversity is not an obstacle to Ambazonian nationhood; it is the human foundation upon which a just, federal, secure, prosperous, and united nation must be built.

Hans Ngala / The Independentist News Editorial Desk