Malik Afegbua, a Nigerian artist and filmmaker using AI to preserve African stories, knows exactly what disappears when an African elder dies. Not just a person passes, what would also go with him or her include: a genealogy, a language, a medicinal practice, a war account, an entire way of understanding the world.
He tells CNN, “I don’t know what my great-grandfather looks like. There is no data, there is no library.” That admission, from a man who works at the intersection of artificial intelligence and African storytelling, is the most honest diagnosis of a crisis that rarely makes international headlines. Africa is losing its oral history in real time. And Malik Afegbua has decided he is not going to watch it happen.
Afegbua sees the danger in that silence. To him, telling African stories is not just a choice; it is the only way to ensure that the global technology narrative does not leave African truth behind. So he built a project to fight back.
What LegacyLink is actually building
Afegbua has launched LegacyLink, a project that hopes not just to preserve the experiences and lives of elders across the continent, but to make them “live forever.” The mechanics are ambitious. He interviews elders about their lives, records their stories, captures video footage, and makes 3D scans of family heirlooms – masks, drums, ceremonial objects that carry centuries of meaning. From that data, he builds digital twins of the elders themselves.
The end goal is holographic displays in public spaces like airports, bus stops, and cultural centres, where anyone can walk up and have a conversation with a digital elder. The AI generates responses based on Afegbua’s recorded interviews with that specific person. He describes the experience as feeling “like someone is standing in front of you, having a conversation with you.”
He envisions a hologram mounted at a bus stop in Ikeja, Lagos, a digital public library accessible to anyone, rooted in heritage and culture, covering everything from history and medicine to geography and economics.
Afegbua is a Nigerian artist building what governments and institutions have failed to build: an accessible, living archive of African knowledge.
DON’T MISS THIS: Khaby Lame: The man who conquered the internet with silence
The data problem nobody talks about
Here is the part of this story that matters most for anyone thinking seriously about Africa and technology.
When Afegbua began experimenting with AI systems, what he found troubled him deeply. “When you look at AI systems, there is a lot of misrepresentation and bias because our data was not captured properly,” he explained. “Even the ones that are captured are misrepresented data.”
The large language models and image generation systems now reshaping how the world communicates, creates, and remembers were trained overwhelmingly on Western data. African languages, African faces, African histories, and African knowledge systems are either absent, underrepresented, or actively distorted in the datasets that power these tools.
Afegbua encountered this directly when generating images. “When you put ‘African’ they look less dapper and in a less nice environment,” he noted, a bias baked into the system by the absence of accurate African data at the training stage.
LegacyLink is, at its core, a data sovereignty project. By building custom datasets with guardrails that restrict the model to specific, verified information, Afegbua ensures the AI iterates only on documented facts. “When you have guardrails on a model system, there is a way it won’t stray too far off,” he explained. “Even if the AI is hallucinating, it’s still beating around the same subject, just on a different variation.”
Africa cannot afford to let its story be told by systems trained without its data. Afegbua is building the alternative.
The elders who almost said no
The project’s most revealing moment happened in Ikorodu, Lagos State, before a single interview was recorded.
A local chief told Afegbua that cultural stories were not meant to be shared. Their ancestors had said so. The knowledge was protected, not public. Afegbua did not push. He brought a slideshow, walked them through the concept, and introduced them to large language models to show how AI could support storytelling and memory preservation.
After seeing it, they were excited. They wanted to learn. The Ikorodu project was ultimately done in collaboration with the IGA Nigeria Development Lab, a Lagos State parastatal, and UNESCO.
That negotiation – between preservation and protection, between openness and ancestral instruction- is one of the most honest tensions in African cultural work. Some knowledge was never meant for public consumption. Afegbua is navigating that line carefully, and the fact that elders in Ikorodu ultimately chose to participate suggests he is doing it right.
He has been equally careful around sensitive historical events. On the Nigerian Civil War, which lasted from 1967 to 1970 and killed between one and three million people, the majority of his subjects were hesitant. Some refused outright. “The trauma is still very present. We never push,” he said.
Rebuilding what was taken
LegacyLink preserves living memory. But Afegbua’s parallel project, ReMemory, goes further back to what was destroyed before anyone alive could remember it.
For ReMemory, He uses AI to recreate African heritage sites that have been lost, destroyed, or are no longer accessible, basing his reconstructions on historical records and academic studies. Once complete, users will be able to navigate the sites on their phones, computers, or in virtual reality.
His first major reconstruction target is the walls of Benin City, built between the 7th and 14th centuries, running over 1,200 kilometres, standing 18 metres tall. British soldiers destroyed Benin City in 1897, and today only traces of the ancient city remain in the present-day metropolis.
What the British looted (Benin Bronzes, ivory carvings, and ceremonial objects), which now sit in the British Museum and institutions across Europe, represents one of history’s most documented cases of cultural theft. What they burned and destroyed is less quantifiable. ReMemory is an attempt to recover some of it.
The project began with a VR film of the Kofar Mata dye pits in Kano, which have operated for five centuries and are central to the city’s identity, after insecurity in the region made the site increasingly inaccessible.
Why is this bigger than art?
Afegbua is ranked among the top five AI artists in Africa and serves on Nigeria’s Council for Creative Technology Futures. His Elder Series was recognised by the World Health Organisation as part of its Decade of Healthy Ageing campaign and showcased at the United Nations and World Economic Forum. He has worked with Meta, Marvel Studios, IBM, and American Express.
But the significance of what he is building goes beyond credentials and accolades. His target is to interview 1,000 elders by 2028 across Nigeria, Kenya, Cameroon, and beyond, building a continental archive of African memory in the languages those memories actually live in. He is explicit that human translators, not AI, will handle the linguistic work, because AI does not yet understand the nuances of many African languages.
Follow BLKNOW for the stories behind the headlines: Instagram/X
