Young Liberians Turn to TikTok and Podcasts to Preserve History Lost to War

In Monrovia and across Liberia, a generation of young people has claimed the internet as a new gathering place for stories that once lived only in the voices of elders. TikTok videos explain cultural traditions. Podcasts dig into the country's past. Facebook posts surface forgotten photographs. YouTube channels document family histories. The stage has changed, but the work remains ancient: keeping memory alive.

For centuries, Liberia's history traveled through conversation and ceremony. Unlike the griots of the Sahel—professional oral historians who preserved knowledge across West Africa—Liberian elders carried this responsibility without formal title or payment. They were the keepers of family lineages, cultural practices, and the narratives that held communities together. That chain of transmission, unbroken for generations, snapped during the country's two civil wars. Between 1989 and 2003, fighting killed an estimated 250,000 people and displaced hundreds of thousands more. Entire communities scattered. Elders died. The younger generation grew up amid displacement and trauma, separated from the people and places where history had always been taught.

Bilphena Decontee Yahwon, founder of Archive Liberia, began her own search for answers to personal questions about identity and belonging. She wanted to understand her own story, but quickly realized it was inseparable from Liberia's larger story—the precolonial past, the upheavals that followed, the wars that reshaped everything. That personal inquiry became a movement. Young Liberians across the country have begun using digital platforms to reclaim narratives about their past, to challenge the accounts written from outside their borders, and to reach audiences scattered across the diaspora and around the world.

The shift reflects something deeper than technological adoption. As Liberia urbanized, young people migrated from rural communities to cities, leaving behind the physical spaces where oral histories had always been shared. Nearly half of the urban population consists of internal migrants. The palava hut—the traditional gathering place where elders spoke and younger people listened—no longer functioned as the primary venue for cultural transmission. Digital platforms filled that gap. A story posted on Facebook or TikTok travels in seconds to audiences across continents. The medium is new. The purpose is old.

Yet the shift has introduced complications that the traditional system never faced. Only about one in three Liberians has internet access, according to World Bank data, meaning vast portions of the population cannot participate in or benefit from these digital archives. Literacy stands at 58.6 percent among those aged 15 and above, limiting who can verify historical claims or engage critically with the information being shared. More fundamentally, social media has removed the safeguards that once protected historical knowledge. Traditional griots underwent years of training, and their recitations were fact-checked by elders who held them accountable. Online, anyone can post anything. Creators chase followers and influence without necessarily vetting their claims or considering their responsibility to accuracy.

For Yahwon, the challenge extends beyond simple fact-checking. Much of what has been written about Liberia, she argues, reflects narratives shaped by colonial and imperialist perspectives—accounts that lack grounding in Liberian voices and Liberian understanding. Reclaiming the country's history means not just preserving it but reframing it, undoing the distortions that have accumulated over centuries.

The Liberia Tourism Authority has begun working with historians, cultural institutions, and content creators to improve access to historical resources and support the production of accurate stories. But the broader solution, according to those working in this space, is not to discourage young people from telling stories online. It is to help them tell better ones. Silence, as one observer noted, poses a far greater threat than conversation. The future of Liberian history may not be written first in textbooks. It may be uploaded to platforms that did not exist a generation ago, preserved by young people who understand that they are not simply inheriting the past—they are creating it and deciding how it will be remembered.