Digital storytelling can contribute to indigenous knowledge

Mail & Guardian

04-07-2025

Digital storytelling, particularly via social media, helps indigenous communities preserve and share their knowledge and histories, fostering decolonisation
'I saw a TikTok the other day …' These are words frequently uttered by young people. It is the fifth most used social media platform in the world and joins YouTube and Instagram as sites where people create skits and structure narratives through images, video audio and text as a form of digital storytelling.
Digital storytelling can be defined as the making of a short, narrated film, often by people with little or no professional media production experience.
Around the world, storytelling has always been oral, taking place at gatherings or rituals tied to identity and belonging and used to teach values and morals. Such storytelling methods are common in indigenous communities to explain their way of life and how everything came to be, maintaining symbolism, preserving community knowledge and history.
While much of this continues to be practised, given the digital world, there are projects afoot to integrate indigenous knowledge with digital storytelling as a form of documenting and preserving it. This is seen as indigenous communities leveraging digital media as a tool in their ongoing struggle for decolonisation.
Indigenous digital storytelling
One of the many ways indigenous communities seek justice and promote self-determination and self-preservation is through various forms of storytelling, shared within a group of people and their ancestors. Indigenous storytelling nurtures, educates, serves as a form of resistance and communicates the experiences of colonial oppression, dispossession and injustice.
Indigenous storytelling positions and exposes multiple truths and meanings to knowledge, foregrounding the indigenous ways of knowing and doing that colonial projects sought to erase. Indigenous storytelling, grounded in history, is about understanding lived experiences and realities from the vantage point of the downtrodden and accentuating the beliefs, values and traditions of diverse indigenous peoples.
Because colonialism invades a people's mental universe, displacing what they previously knew, replacing it with what colonialism has brought in, indigenous knowledge promotes knowledge that is relevant within certain cultural contexts and advocates for indigenisation of knowledge as well as the multiplicity of knowledge.
Digital storytelling brings together narratives with audio and visual content. Thus, its role in indigenous knowledge is that it offers opportunities for rich, intergenerational exchanges that promote locally relevant insights. Digital storytelling foregrounds specific issues from specific perspectives, promotes critical thinking and fosters knowledge-sharing and capacity-building. Moreover, digital storytelling delves into the narratives of indigenous people by amplifying their voices and experiences in such a way that their realities are not distorted or erased.
Decolonial digital journeys: The Popi Show
Indigenous realities, experiences and knowledge filtered through Western negations are subject to distortions, fabrications, omissions and erasures. Drawing from
Rediscovering is creating digital stories of indigenous peoples where their perspectives, their culture, identity and expressions are the centre of the recordings and visuals that are featured on digital platforms such as social media. The role of social media in the rediscovery and recovery of indigenous knowledge in a digital world is important to disrupting Western distortions of indigenous peoples and remembering indigenous ways of knowing and doing.
Young content creators across the African continent are actively remembering the stories of their ancestors by using social media platforms like YouTube, Instagram and TikTok to disseminate this knowledge for larger audiences to learn and engage.
Among them is Popi Sibiya, a South African content creator and traveller, who has a unique way of sharing indigenous stories on TikTok and YouTube. Through her online series
Her journey across the African continent and South America centres the spiritual, cultural and historical roots of the indigenous peoples. In her unconventional means of travel — boats, bikes, buses, walking or even asking the locals for lifts — Sibiya listens to indigenous stories and shares indigenous knowledge, captures and partakes in traditions as a form of participatory memory.
In one video, Sibiya visits the San people — the indigenous hunter-gather group of Southern Africa — in Botswana. When she spends time with the San, dressed in their traditional attire and participating in their ways of finding subsistence through eating things like berries and wild spinach, consuming water plants, and learning how to light fires, she is bearing witness to cosmologies that survived colonialism, forced removals from the Central Kalahari Game Reserve and centuries of silencing.
She engages in what can be described as reciprocal documentation — filming trance dances, story-circles and language rituals with the awareness that the stories belong to the people, not to her camera.
Some of the many stories Sibiya documents are those of the people in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, a country that has been experiencing ongoing violence, human rights violations, mass displacements and colonial traumas. She spent days at camps for internally displaced people in Goma, highlighting the everyday struggles of the people, from children who do not have access to education to those learning in precarious conditions, from farmers who have lost their land to people who have lost their livelihoods.
She engages with the local communities, where people speak of war, displacement, mining exploitation and gender-based violence.
The Popi Show is actively filming, platforming and archiving local legends, spiritual cosmologies and clan histories which are passed down orally by the elders. This demonstrates that social media can be a site of learning, critical thinking and a safe space for sharing of indigenous stories.
Because decolonising knowledge means challenging the dominant narratives that distort those of indigenous communities, the role of social media in documenting, sharing, reclaiming and memorialising indigenous knowledge is the process of rediscovery and recovery neglected by mainstream media and education systems.
Kgomotso Komane is a PhD candidate and writes on behalf of
at the University of Pretoria.