[This essay from SAPIENS describes a fascinating, important and inspiring application of presence by a team of curators, anthropologists, and heritage professionals who are “leveraging 3D and immersive technologies to enable Liberians to intimately experience and interpret Liberian cultural objects that have been dispersed around the world.” A Liberian educator and collaborator quoted near the end describes the project’s impact this way: “VR technology is not just a new experience but a theater of our sacred past… It brings our nearly forgotten cultural identity and images into the present.” See the original version of the essay for four more images. –Matthew]

[Image: Traveling Treasures project partner, LeAnn Knowlden, adjusts a virtual reality headset worn by a Liberian student to immersively engage in Liberian cultural objects currently housed within U.S. collections. Credit: Back-to-Africa Heritage and Archaeology (BAHA) Project]

How Virtual Reality Is Restoring Liberia’s Culture

Traveling Treasures is a new project led by a team of anthropologists that puts Liberians directly in touch with their dispersed cultural heritage through immersive technologies designed to bridge continents and histories.

By Craig Stevens and Chrislyn Laurie Laurore
April 23, 2025

When students donned virtual reality headsets for the first time last year at William V.S. Tubman High School in Monrovia, Liberia, it wasn’t to play the latest viral video game. Instead, they spent time engaging Liberian cultural objects housed in collections over 4,500 miles away in the United States.

None of the students expressed any interest in visiting the nearby National Museum of Liberia—where hundreds of similar objects await their attention—yet they crowded around iPads to play with a 3D model of a 1952 presidential inauguration souvenir and formed a line that extended outside of the classroom to use their virtual hands to intimately explore Indigenous earthenware pots.

For perhaps the first time in their lives, these young Liberians were motivated to engage their country’s material heritage that had long been inaccessible to them. Their teachers enthusiastically requested more of this exciting and immersive educational content.

The demonstration workshop was part of a pilot study for the Traveling Treasures project, a transnational collaboration between the National Museum of Liberia (NMOL) and the Back-to-Africa Heritage and Archaeology Project (BAHA). As BAHA researchers, our work focuses on Liberia’s culture and heritage, leveraging 3D and immersive technologies to enable Liberians to intimately experience and interpret Liberian cultural objects that have been dispersed around the world.

We launched Traveling Treasures in 2024 to increase community access and representation within Liberian collections in the U.S. This effort builds upon a deep history of transatlantic connections that facilitated the 19th-century founding of Liberia, which became Africa’s first republic, and decades of back-to-Africa migrations by Black communities from the United States and the Caribbean. The histories of Liberia’s Black American settlers, and the complex transatlantic identities formed by their descendants, presents an opportunity to explore the dynamic nature of the Black Atlantic world in the past and present.

DISPLACED CULTURAL HERITAGE

In the early 1820s, the West African colony of Liberia was established for Black Americans by the American Colonization Society, a U.S.-government supported organization founded to repatriate freeborn and formerly enslaved Black families and individuals. Following 25 years of colonial dependence, Black American settlers declared their sovereignty and founded the Republic of Liberia in 1847. Over the following decades, thousands of Black American migrants and their descendants settled, developed, and ruled Liberia as a means of freeing themselves from racial persecution in the U.S. and reconnecting with the imagined landscapes of their African ancestors.

In 1980, 133 years of Americo-Liberian governance ended when Master Sgt. Samuel Kanyon Doe successfully led a violent military coup. Doe’s rule was marked by authoritarianism and civil unrest. Between 1989 and 2003, as various leaders vied for power, a series of catastrophic civil wars resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, and countless more were displaced.

During this period, the National Museum of Liberia, the foremost institution for the preservation and presentation of the nation’s material culture, was vandalized and looted. Parts of the NMOL collections were lost, stolen, or destroyed due to violent confrontations that progressed from the hinterland to the capital city of Monrovia. Since most items were removed from the National Museum without records of their origins, it became difficult to trace the objects’ paths from Monrovia to public and private collections in Europe and North America.

Today only a single catalog card from the pre-war period remains at the NMOL, according to museum director Albert Markeh, who shared this information with the BAHA team during a 2023 meeting in Monrovia. While the museum’s historic building on Broad Street has been restored since the war, its vast collection was never fully recovered. Our research revealed that a large quantity of Liberia’s material culture is housed within museum and university collections in the U.S.

The transfer of Liberian objects to the U.S. has a long, often poorly documented history. William “Bill” Siegmann, an American art collector and curator, directed Liberia’s National Museum from 1984 to 1987, before returning to the U.S. amid rising violence in Monrovia. He later joined the Brooklyn Museum and amassed over 1,600 West African artworks. In addition, his collection now graces the halls and storerooms of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art, Indiana University, and the Minneapolis Institute of Art. At the Penn Museum in Pennsylvania, nearly 40 percent of 457 Liberian objects came from a single 1944 donation by H.S. Oberly, whose ties to Liberia remain unclear.

Due to prolonged instability and limited research occurring within Liberia, many of these works lack detailed context about their cultural significance and how they were used. For decades, Liberian communities had very few opportunities to participate in the curation and interpretation of their dispersed heritage—until now.

IMMERSIVE TECHNOLOGIES, EMERGING STORIES

The Traveling Treasures project is a material culture diplomacy initiative designed to nurture institutional relationships between U.S. museums and the National Museum of Liberia. In collaboration with NMOL staff members, the project presents high-resolution 3D models of Liberian objects in U.S. collections to Liberian curators, students, and the interested public through virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) immersive experiences.

While VR and AR have rapidly advanced in many fields, their adoption in humanities research and design remains slow, despite their potential to increase meaningful access to material culture collections. 3D digitization creates high-quality digital replicas of objects, allowing users to explore, hold, and interact with them virtually on most modern devices.

During one AR demonstration at the William V.S. Tubman High School, students and teachers interacted virtually with a Liberian election fan housed at the Melville J. Herskovits Library of African Studies at Northwestern University in Illinois. Made of wood and paper, the inaugural souvenir marked the 1951 reelection of Liberia’s longest-serving president, William V.S. Tubman (1944–1971), the influential politician for whom the high school is named.

The central text of the fan is bordered by miniature portraits of President Tubman and First Lady Antoinette Tubman, and Vice President William Tolbert and Second Lady Victoria Tolbert. Through infrastructure projects and policies promoting national unity, the Tubman administration worked to reduce the social divide between Liberians of settler descent and those who were Indigenous, marking what’s often called Liberia’s Golden Age.

Esmeralda Kale, the curator of the Herskovits Library of African Studies, recalled an emotional moment with Tolbert’s daughter, Christine: “She almost burst into tears, and she says to us, ‘I haven’t seen this material since I was a child. I haven’t seen this fan since I was a child.’” While Christine Tolbert Norman was later able to visit the library regularly, high travel costs and visa rejections prevent most Liberians from doing the same. Traveling Treasures now provides a way for them to connect with their displaced cultural belongings in ways that were once impossible.

Our use of immersive technologies is not deployed as a flashy gimmick but as a means to achieving a much broader goal—to empower users’ deep engagement of the materiality, the ways in which objects shape human ideas and behaviors, of digitized cultural objects. Reflecting on the demonstration at Tubman High, Liberian project partner LeAnn Knowlden stated:

“It was more than technology; it was storytelling at its finest. These students didn’t just hear about history—they experienced it. Watching their faces light up as they ‘touched’ Liberia’s past brought the significance of our mission into sharp focus. Traveling Treasures isn’t just about artifacts; it’s about empowering Liberians to reconnect with their roots in a way that feels personal, immersive, and unforgettable. For me, this journey underscored the power of innovative education to bridge the gap between our history and our future.”

PSYCHIC REPAIR, EQUITABLE FUTURES

In recent years, ongoing debates about the restitution, reclamation, and repatriation of African objects in European and U.S. collections have raised questions about the future of museums and their role within an equitable and collaborative global heritage industry. Approximately 90 percent of sub-Saharan Africa’s collected material culture is housed within major world museums outside the continent. Representing the “spoils of Empire,” these collections are indicative of the extractive nature of colonialism.

Demands for repatriation outweigh legal debates over ownership and stewardship, according to scholars Felwine Sarr and Bénédicte Savoy in their 2018 report The Restitution of African Cultural Heritage. The return of these objects constitutes a form of collective psychic and spiritual repair—a catalyst for alternative imaginings of present and future possibilities in communities across Africa. Sarr and Savoy write that on a continent where 60 percent of the population is under the age of 20, young people must have access to “their own culture, creativity, and spirituality” from past eras.

This is especially necessary in post-conflict Liberia, where the effects of cultural loss facilitated by the dispersal of objects have been compounded by the displacement of people and communities. Due to the civil wars, large-scale internal and external migrations have destabilized the place-based connections needed to sustain cultural memory and practice.

“The war pushed people to Ghana, to Cote d’Ivoire, to Guinea, to Monrovia,” explained Liberian historian C. Patrick Burrowes in a recent interview with co-author Chrislyn Laurie Laurore. “And when the war ended, there was no effort on the part of the government to encourage people to return to their traditional homes. These places were unsafe. People were traumatized.” About a third of Liberians now live in and around Monrovia, Burrowes added. Many young Monrovians have parents who may have once spoken a local language, but their children don’t speak it because they’ve been disconnected from their local cultures and communities.

In February, co-author Craig Stevens traveled to areas in Liberia where many of the U.S.-housed Liberian objects originate. Stevens and National Museum colleagues hosted VR demonstrations where community members recorded their immersive interactions with cultural objects. This content will enable staff at U.S. collecting institutions to incorporate first-person interpretations and community perspectives of these objects into their digital collections databases and upcoming Africa-related exhibitions or programming.

Traveling Treasures is not a replacement for rightful calls for the return of unjustly collected objects. Instead, this work strives to radically expand accessibility and community representation in the curation of African cultural objects—particularly those tied to a long history of inequity, injustice, and colonial violence by collecting institutions in Europe and the United States.

Our methodology challenges the power dynamics of standard museum practice by prioritizing local lived experiences and cultural memory over foreign academic perspectives. Agreements between the NMOL and U.S. institutions, such as one currently being formed with the Penn Museum, are a first step toward establishing formal transatlantic relationships to support more equitable exchanges of knowledge and resources. Importantly, we hope these collaborations will enhance the National Museum’s capacity to engage Liberian audiences in and beyond Monrovia.

As a team of curators, anthropologists, and heritage professionals, we are motivated to empathetically curate African objects for African and Diasporic communities. Early feedback from collaborators affirms the power of this work.

“VR technology is not just a new experience but a theater of our sacred past,” Liberian educator and collaborator John Lissa told us in February. “It brings our nearly forgotten cultural identity and images into the present.”

These heartfelt connections drive us to continue to use objects and museums to foster lasting transnational relationships and support communities most affected by colonial harm across the African continent.

Historical and cultural memory play critical roles in rebuilding Liberia. Through the 3D digitization of Liberian objects in these collections, we hope to begin the suturing of cultural wounds inflicted by the civil wars. As Liberia continues to redevelop its tourism and heritage industries, Liberians have much to gain by reclaiming their country’s displaced cultural heritage.