From Palava Huts to TikTok: Young Liberians Are Preserving Their Past
A new generation of Liberians is turning to TikTok, podcasts and YouTube to keep oral history and cultural traditions alive, after two civil wars disrupted how that knowledge was once passed down.
For generations, Liberians gathered in palava huts — open, communal meeting spaces — to pass down history, proverbs and tradition through oral storytelling. Today, a new generation is moving that same tradition onto TikTok, podcasts, Facebook and YouTube.
Bilphena Decontee Yahwon, founder of the project Archive Liberia, is among those using digital platforms to record and share Liberian history and culture, alongside historian Patrick Burrowes and Zuleka Dauda of the Center for Integrated Solutions. Their efforts come after Liberia's two civil wars, from 1989 to 2003, killed an estimated 250,000 people and badly disrupted how knowledge was traditionally passed between generations.
The shift online is not without challenges. Only about one in three Liberians has internet access, and nearly half of urban residents are internal migrants who have moved away from the communities where oral histories were traditionally shared. Unlike some West African nations, Liberia never had a formal caste of professional storytellers, or griots, whose role was partly to verify and fact-check the history being passed down — a safeguard that social media does not automatically provide.
Even so, those working to document Liberia's past see the shift as an opportunity rather than only a risk: a way to reach young Liberians, at home and in the diaspora, wherever they already are.