From palava huts to TikTok: How Liberians are preserving their past 

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.

Zuleka Dauda, chief programme officer at the Center for Integrated Solutions, a Liberian-owned research and strategic planning organisation, says the shift reflects evolution rather than loss.

“Culture should never stand still,” she tells Al Jazeera.

“Young Liberians are consuming culture differently, but it’s still being taught and shared. Instead of gathering around the palava hut, they gather around TikTok, Facebook, podcasts and YouTube. We didn’t lose storytelling. We changed the stage.”

For many creators, these platforms have become spaces to document traditions, preserve family histories and challenge narratives about Liberia that have often been shaped from outside the country.

Historical photographs, forgotten traditions and family memories are reaching new audiences as Liberians use technology to reconnect with their past.

But taking storytelling online has also brought new challenges.

Truth and memory

Access remains one of the biggest barriers.

According to World Bank figures, just over one in three Liberians uses the internet, limiting who can participate in this growing digital archive.

There is also the challenge of misinformation.

Traditional storytellers learned over many years, with elders responsible for correcting inaccuracies and protecting the knowledge passed between generations.

Social media has opened storytelling to everyone, but it has also removed many of those safeguards.

“Historically, African griots underwent rigorous training, and the recitation of knowledge by young acolytes was fact-checked by their elders,” says Burrowes.

“But social media is a brave new world. Individual users do not undergo training in sifting fact from falsehood. Many users post information without vetting. They often use their platforms to gain followers and influence, without regard to social responsibility.”

Limited literacy and restricted access to archives also make it harder for many Liberians to verify historical claims. Government figures estimate literacy among Liberians aged 15 and above at 58.6 percent.

For Yahwon, however, the challenge is not only about accuracy but also about who gets to shape Liberia’s historical narrative.

“For me, one of the biggest challenges in telling Liberian stories, culture and history is undoing the ahistorical account of our past that has dominated for so long,” she says.

“So much of what has been written about Liberia is shaped by narratives that lack an anti-colonial and anti-imperialist perspective.”

Who gets to tell Liberia’s story?

As more Liberians turn to digital platforms to preserve the past, the challenge is ensuring those stories remain rooted in evidence as well as memory.

The Liberia Tourism Authority says it is working with historians, cultural institutions and content creators to improve access to historical resources and help produce accurate, engaging stories about Liberia.

Dauda believes the answer is not to discourage young people from telling stories online, but to help them tell better ones.

“Silence is a far greater threat than conversation. We need to find ways to encourage young Liberians to tell better stories,” she says.

The voices have changed. The responsibility has not. Whether stories are shared beneath a palava hut or uploaded to TikTok, the task remains the same: ensuring Liberia’s past is preserved for the generations that follow.

“Our generation doesn’t just inherit history. We are creating it and sharing it,” Dauda says.

“Think about it. The future of Liberian history may not be written first in textbooks. It may be uploaded.”