In a world where so many know so little about Liberia's creative landscape, a new, adventurous group of Liberian youth is taking matters into their own hands, hell-bent on changing the face of creative expression in the capital city of Monrovia.

While our increasingly globalized world has, in recent years, grown to acknowledge select African city-centers like Lagos, Accra, Nairobi, amongst others, as hubs of cultural innovation, many continental creative scenes still remain obscure. These spaces are often overshadowed by narratives of unending turmoil or “underdevelopment” that still dominate reporting about Africa.

Monrovia is amongst these cities, owing its outdated public image, amongst a number of things, to the peculiarity of its national history.

Founded as a settlement for freed Black people from the New World — one which encroached upon the land and autonomy of the indigenous Africans who had long lived there — Liberia's origins led to a society marked by deep friction and inequality. This ultimately escalated into civil wars before 2000, devastating the nation, triggering mass migration, and crippling its economy and infrastructure.

While before the war, Liberia was something of an African cultural hotspot, seeing international visitors like James Brown, Miriam Makeba, and Nina Simone, who would go on to write her song “Liberian Calypso,” the infrastructural damage that came in the war’s wake heavily curtailed the growth of the country’s creative sector. And even as the war is long over, its reverberations — infrastructure-wise — still linger.

“Monrovia is the engine room of Liberia’s entertainment,” declares Dounard Bondo II, a 29-year-old Liberian lawyer, journalist, and pop culture commentator. “There is an underbelly of creatives brewing underneath, and most of the structural and creative changes the scene will see in the coming decade will be led by them.”

“Five to ten years ago, the creative scene was largely underdeveloped,” Dounard says simply. “[This] is largely due to a lack of funding, structure, and institutional support. With high poverty rates and limited opportunities to earn, investment in the creative space has been limited. Data is expensive, and it's not everywhere, so people hardly stream, affecting income. There is no public gallery, only one functional cinema, and renting drama halls is expensive, just to mention.”

The uninitiated might struggle to understand Dounard’s confidence, but others share his sentiments. “I believe that when there’s less attention, you can have more fun because you can be yourself,” says Abubakar Jalloh, known throughout Monrovia as Jac the Realest. Jalloh is the founder of Too Easy, Liberia’s pre-eminent streetwear brand, a collective so well-known that its signature shirts have graced the backs of current President Joseph Boakai and former President George Weah.

“Before Too Easy, there was not much happening. Nobody cared about the clothing industry,” he tells OkayAfrica, detailing the journey from the brand’s 2023 foundation. “There are a lot of people who have been doing a lot with fashion, but not streetwear. Over time, we’ve opened up the entire market. We [are] industry leaders. Now, people have found purpose in wearing a Liberia-owned brand, which means other creatives have figured out there’s a space for this.”

Too Easy and the collective of brands that followed it — like KayBlay, Big Drip Kicks, and ZIG Customized — have progressively become a rallying point for Liberian youths, fostering the deep sense of belonging integral to any creative scene worth its salt. In under five years, Monrovia’s local streetwear culture has exploded, becoming the most popular part of the city’s DIY scene. Additionally, this newfound excitement and ownership around homegrown cultural production is now mirrored in other key creative sectors.

“It never used to be like this. You would go out and hear music [from other countries] playing; now, most of the songs are Liberian songs, especially from young people. I think this is one of the highest peaks [the scene] has ever reached.” This is Datway Ezzy, Monrovia’s Logan Town-raised hip-hop preacher. At only 19 years old, the rising talent is already making waves in the scene with his gritty lyricism and command of hip-hop, hipco, and trapco–rap genres fusing Liberia’s creole language Kolokwa.

“Everybody is hungry for success,” he explains. “Our generation has doubled down on making music that actually resonates with us, not just making music to please a certain group of people. Instead of focusing on what’s trending, they’re staying authentic.”

The result of this staunch authenticity has been the success of artists like Spize, Jboy the Prophet, Fazari, King Dennis, and Nuchie Meek, as well as acts like Cralorboi CIC and JZyNo, whose feature on Lasmid’s “Butter My Bread’ has successfully taken Liberian sound across the globe. Datway Ezzy is also part and parcel of this movement to be original at all costs, alongside rappers like Co-Z, Docway, Will B, Poko$, Wicked Hyndx, and MC Caro. His work explores themes of depression, loss, and youthful braggadocio. The sheer rawness sets him apart and embodies the complexity and creativity of Liberian youth.

“My music is real and it’s different from every rapper that’s currently in Liberia,” he tells me. “That’s the reason why up-and-coming artists are taking over the music scene. We’re not copying, just expressing what life here really feels like. It’s spiritual in a way, like we’re laying down the foundation for what Liberia’s artistic legacy will look like 10, 20 years from now.”

Further embodying this complete abandonment of convention is Panda, or He Paints Ugly Faces. Inspired by South Africa’s Samurai Farai, this 25-year-old painter, whose real name is Gerald Massaquoi, developed a particularly unique art style after growing weary of Liberia’s monotonous visual arts landscape. “There are no art galleries here; people line their art on the roadside,” he tells OkayAfrica. “All around Monrovia, you can see these paintings, and they are all the same. And that just clicked: I can’t be doing the same thing as everybody. One day, I went to the beach and there was this seashell. It was interesting, I liked the shape of it. It looked like a mouth. So I said, ‘Why can’t I just make my own visual language too?’ Then I started doing my sketch, brick by brick, until the whole face was assembled. Then I started doing some paintings and posting them, and people started reacting to it.”

His work — tackling everything from the peaceful mundanity of Liberian life to drug abuse and despondency amongst Liberian youth — offers a serious thematic and aesthetic intervention into what he feels is an almost nonexistent visual arts scene. With this novel work, he believes that other artistically-inclined youth now have the representation that they never had. “A whole lot of people are getting inspired,” Panda asserts. “You're seeing people buy canvases and trying to work. We’re really just trying to build up a foundation, to let people know that these things can be done in Liberia.”

With no guidance from their forerunners — because they themselves are the pioneers — this new generation is laying the foundations of an aesthetic, visual, and communal culture that is distinctly young and Liberian. While lacking institutional support remains a key issue — Dounard cites everything from minimal state funding and arts institutions to limited education about IP laws — young Liberians continue to innovate, not simply producing new work, but also producing good work. This incessant desire to create and flip the script has resulted in a close-knit community of like-minded innovators, and everyone has worked with everyone. “The scene is tight, but not in a cliquey way,” Datway Ezzy says. “It’s more like survival-bonded. Everyone knows what it’s like to be underestimated, underfunded, overlooked…so that naturally brings us together. There’s a lot of mutual respect in the scene. You’ll see designers pulling up to support a rapper’s show, or filmmakers helping shoot music videos just off the strength of the vision.”

These creatives convene at festivals like December’s Tidal Rave and Big Jue Season, or creative spaces like Momo Market pop-ups and The LinkUp. They continue to step in where the state doesn’t — Jac talks about Too Easy’s seminars and workshops geared at supporting young people and women-led businesses. Their sole request is that young Liberians not be underestimated by their compatriots or by the world. “Monrovia’s creative scene is still small, but there’s a lot of heart,” Datway Ezzy shares. “You can feel the hunger, the ambition, the hope. It’s not perfect: we’re still learning how to organize and collaborate without ego, but there’s something beautiful in that. We’re growing up in real time, and we’re doing it together. ”

It’s been over a decade since former South African President and global icon Nelson Mandela passed away. Every year on his birthday, 18 July, South Africans, and everyone around the world, are asked to dedicate 67 minutes of their time to helping others. The number marks the years Mandela spent in service — from his early legal work in Johannesburg and underground activism, to his imprisonment on Robben Island alongside other stalwarts of the liberation struggle.

This year, Mandela Day arrives during a particularly volatile moment in the country. Just last week, Lieutenant General Nhlanhla Lucky Mkhwanazi publicly accused Police Minister Senzo Mchunu and other senior officials of disbanding a task team investigating political assassinations in KwaZulu-Natal, and of concealing evidence. These are serious allegations, with the potential to shake national politics. In response, President Cyril Ramaphosa has ordered the formation of a commission of inquiry.

All this unfolds against a backdrop of deepening instability. The Government of National Unity is fragile, always one disagreement away from collapse. In Mandela’s home province, the Eastern Cape, recent floods have resulted in deaths and left communities reeling. At the same time, budget cuts to key health programmes are raising alarms about the state’s ability to care for its people.

OkayAfrica took to the streets to speak to young South Africans about their thoughts and feelings about Mandela Day. For Sivenathi, a student at the University of the Western Cape, the day represents “the effort and progress made towards addressing the injustices of the past.”

She continues: “It also poses a solution for us to work together towards addressing those injustices, and taking a collaborative and bottom-up approach to addressing the issues we face as a society because of our past.”

Buhlebethu Magwaza (31) agrees. As the project lead at Youth Capital, a campaign advocating for key policy changes to solve youth unemployment, she recognises the urgency of a youth locked out of employment opportunities. She plans to spend Mandela Day helping young people format their resumes and with reading and comprehending job descriptions. For her, the day is about “collective action.”

“It’s about what you can do with your community to give back. It’s about being courageous, it’s about unity, and doing something for someone. Mandela was really about nation building and what we can do to ensure that everyone contributes to a better South Africa, continent, and even the world,” she says.

Compassion and courage are two values of the revered former statesman that she still abides by today. “To solve today’s development problems, we need to be courageous. In the same breadth, we need to be compassionate; people are going through a lot. We need to remember that we exist within our communities; therefore, we must remember to always be kind in whatever we do,” she says.

The legacy of the man, however, has not gone unquestioned. For many, Mandela’s vision of a “rainbow nation” feels increasingly out of step with South Africa’s present-day realities. The post-apartheid promise of equality and justice remains unfulfilled for millions. Rising inequality, corruption, unemployment, and deep mistrust in political leadership have led some to view Mandela Day as symbolic at best, performative at worst.

But Magwaza reckons the day is still relevant.

“Especially in a world that is going through so much,” she says. “It’s always important that you give back. You go back to communities, see what can be done, and how you can contribute. As someone who works in the youth unemployment space, I think now more than ever we need to pull together to come up with solutions,” she says.

Thapelo Tapala (13), a student, learnt that fighting for one’s rights is important while being taught about Mandela in school. But he doesn’t think that people nowadays pay attention to the day. To his generation, Mandela represents freedom. “We’re young people who need our rights and our freedom,” he says. His cousin Anesu (15) agrees that young people don’t really pay attention to Mandela Day anymore. “I think it’s just another day for them. He does mean a lot to us, even though we don’t really show it in anything we do. He fought for our freedom, and that is why we are where we are now,” he concludes.

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