From palava huts to TikTok: How Liberians are preserving their past
From podcasts to TikTok, young Liberians are using digital platforms to keep history alive and challenge old narratives. Monrovia, Liberia – For generations, Liberia’s history
From podcasts to TikTok, young Liberians are using digital platforms to keep history alive and challenge old narratives. Monrovia, Liberia – For generations, Liberia’s history lived in the voices of its elders, carried through conversations, ceremonies and community gatherings. Today, those stories are finding new audiences across TikTok, Facebook, YouTube, podcasts and digital archives. Young Liberians are documenting their history, exploring their culture and reaching audiences at home and across the diaspora. Rather than replacing traditional storytellers, they are carrying an age-old tradition into the digital age. Across much of West Africa, griots, or oral historians, preserved history through storytelling, music and oral tradition. Liberia never developed the formal griot tradition found across the Sahel, but its elders fulfilled a similar role, preserving family histories, cultural traditions and the stories that bound communities together. Over time, however, that tradition has come under growing pressure. Among those leading efforts to preserve Liberia’s past is Bilphena Decontee Yahwon, founder of Archive Liberia, a memory and political education project that explores Liberian history through research, archives and public storytelling. “I didn’t originally set out to tell Liberian stories. I wanted to tell my own story,” Yahwon says. “Within my story was also a story of war and migration, one that I felt I could only contextualise by understanding the story of Liberia, who we were before the 1800s, what happened afterwards, and what we became. I realised I was inside a web of stories, and that is ultimately what brought me to the work I do now,” she tells Al Jazeera. Her personal search has become part of a wider movement of young Liberians using digital platforms to reclaim the country’s past and reshape how it is remembered.
A history interrupted by war Elders passed down the memories of families, communities, cultural traditions and the events that shaped Liberia for generations, but the country’s civil wars severed that chain. Liberia’s two civil wars, fought between 1989 and 2003, killed an estimated 250,000 people, displaced hundreds of thousands more and disrupted the transmission of history, culture and family memory. “Liberian societies in the forest belt lacked the professional caste of griots that existed in the Sahel. But our elders did their best to transmit historical and cultural knowledge, albeit on an unpaid basis,” says Patrick Burrowes, a Liberian historian and author. “The chain of transmission across generations continued in an unbroken fashion for centuries until the war. That is why we are seeing less and less transmission of accurate historical and cultural knowledge,” Burrowes tells Al Jazeera. The effects of that disruption are still felt today. As Liberia has become more urbanised, many young people have moved away from the communities where oral histories were traditionally shared. According to a 2022 report by the Liberia Institute for Statistics and Geo-Information Services, internal migrants account for 46.7 percent of the urban population, compared with 13.6 percent of the rural population. The places where stories are shared have changed. The need to preserve them has not. The new palava hut For many young Liberians, the new gathering place is online. A historical photograph shared on Facebook, a TikTok video explaining a cultural tradition or a podcast exploring Liberia’s past can now reach audiences far beyond a single community. Stories once shared between elders and younger generations now travel across cities, continents and the Liberian diaspora in seconds.
The BriefWire