Young Innovators Are Driving Monrovia's Creative Scene and Forging a New Cultural Identity

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Monrovia is amongst these cities, owing its outdated public image, amongst a number of things, to the peculiarity of its national history.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

“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.

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.

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.”

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. ”