The regime of Saro social activities in Port Harcourt appears to have been conditioned over the years by three major objectives. These largely determined the scope of the community's social outreach, and the risks it was willing to take in an urban situation where African immigrants from outside Nigeria constituted a very small fraction of the total population. Firstly, the Saro desired to maintain the corporate cultural identity of their group while protecting its members from sundry violations that might emanate from the colonial government or the indigenous population. This appears to have dictated the need for strict discipline within the Sierra Leone Union, and other communal structures, with enforcement responsibility being assigned to a largely male elder category, dedicated to ensuring continued patriarchal control. Secondly, while maintaining the group's identity, there was a concern to secure its progressive articulation with the larger society by a process of lateral incorporation that might require some limited exogamy to procure social access into select segments of local society. Thirdly, the Saro community greatly desired the continued cultivation of ties with Freetown, the “homeland”, and with such Saro enclaves as were to be found in such cities as Lagos and Calabar. This was central to cultural affirmation and group identity. In the pursuit of these objectives, the contradiction between lateral integration into the larger society, and the cultural pursuit of ethnic particularity was not always obvious to some of the group's members. Nor did sufficient thought go into the wider political implications of ethnic exclusivity in a territory already celebrated, by the 1930's, for its potent indigenous cultural nationalism. Under colonialism, these contradictions could easily be sustained. In an environment of political independence from British rule, however, they could greatly threaten the peace of the immigrant community.

Saro social endeavour will be reviewed in the following five principal areas of major activity—education, the church, general social commentary, the Sierra Leone Union as well as Saro involvement in other multiethnic associational groupings, and those perennial “socials” and awujoh, marking various highlights on the group's calendar, that brought the Saro and their local associates together in what seems to have been, in good times, perennial merrymaking.