Renowned US-based Cameroonian scholar, Dr Aja Oro, dies!.

His demise came barely weeks to the launch of his latest publication, ‘Maiden of Hope’, which was billed for August 30, 2025, in Buea, in the South West Region. 

News of his death fell on Tuesday like a bombshell. It has not been disclosed what led to his sudden demise but family sources told The Guardian Post that Dr Aja Oro showed no signs of ill health hours to his departure to the world beyond. 

He was hale and hearty days to his death, we gathered. Renowned for his books on African heritage, Dr Aja Oro has died at not-too advanced age.

An accomplished author and writer of short stories and children’s books, Dr Aja Oro was also a teacher and a former social worker. 

In 2012, the late Dr Aja Oro created the Balondo Cultural Heritage, to promote cultural literacy among Balondo people - specifically Balondo youth. 

Beyond his works as an author and writer, Dr Aja Oro worked as a supervisor at Baltimore, USA Department of Social Services. Throughout his career as a scholar and author, Dr Aja Oro wrote several books, especially on the Balondo culture. 

His well-known publications includ; Afrophobia: The Fear of Being an African; the Front View of Balondo-Bakonja; the Balondo Language Vocabulary Book; Introduction to Balondo Studies; Balondo Through the Ages:1100-2013; The Fundamentals of Balondo Society; Balondo Ba-Konja: The Elders' Narrative; Balondo Are Not Orokos; and Maiden of Hope. 

His most recent publication, “Maiden of Hope”, which was planned to be launched on August 30, 2025, in Buea, tells the story of a Balondo youth from the Port City of Ekondo-Etiti, Cameroon, and his dream of getting a college education and how the dream would never have materialized had it not been for the gracious guidance of "The Maiden of Hope", Gladys Endeley, who advocated and worked tirelessly to ensure that the boy's goal of gaining entrance into a college, having no money and means and with only two weeks left before the semester was to begin, was attained.

Despite many setbacks and against all odds, the boy achieves his mission and ultimately obtains three master's degrees, in addition to a doctoral degree, in the United States.

Meanwhile, within the pages of his publication, “Balondo Through the Ages 1100‒2013”, the author and Balondo expert, Dr Aja Oro properly documented the Balondo story, in the form of a history book, for the perusal of all humankind.

“Balondo Through the Ages” was the first original one-time work written by Aja Oro, a pure Balondo man who chronicled throughout the pages of the book about a thousand years of the Balondo story, highlighting the two historical voyages made by Balondo from the Congo to Calabar, Nigeria, and then to the South-West and Littoral regions of Cameroon. 

Also, in a bid to ensure that the narrative will be viewed as a comprehensive rather than a disjointed panorama, Aja Oro equally made the case for the many threads of continuity running through Balondo’s total historical experience without which it would not have been easy to read and understand such an unprecedented extraordinary long period in the Balondo historical experience as a whole.

Meanwhile, his best-selling book, the “Afrophobia: The Fear of Being of African”, analysis in a compelling and detailed manner, the role of colonialism in African culture with respect to staunch African cultural preservationists, and those Africans who have unreasonably traded their cultural traditions for westernisation.

In carrying out the analytical assessment per say, the concept of Afrophobia, or the fear of being an African, was developed and utilised to thoroughly describe and examine both scenarios, so as to provide a very solid empirical understanding of the deleterious effects of colonialism on the entire African continent-as well as on the global community.

This article was first published in The Guardian Post Edition No:3513 of Thursday July 24, 2025