Around the African continent, there is a saying: “When an elder dies, a library burns to the ground.” For Nigerian artist and filmmaker Malik Afegbua, that loss is not just a metaphor. “I don’t know what my great-grandfather looks like,” he told CNN. “I don’t have stories about him.”

“There is no data, there is no library,” he said.

Afegbua has launched LegacyLink, a project that hopes to not just preserve the experiences and lives of elders around the continent, but make them “live forever,” he says.

He has been interviewing elders about their lives, recording their stories, capturing videos and making 3D scans of their family heirlooms, like masks and drums. With this data, he hopes to make “digital twins” of the elders and present them as holographic displays in public areas, like airports, where people can speak with them, using AI to bring their responses to life.

The final displays will feel “like someone is standing in front of you, having a conversation with you,” Afegbua said. Users would be able to ask the digital elders a question about their lives and experiences, with AI generating a response based on Afegbua’s interviews with that person. He also plans to create an online chatbot, to make the project as accessible as possible.

The initiative is still in an early phase. Afegbua said that he has interviewed 15 people in Nigeria, with 30 more interviews planned, branching out to Kenya and Cameroon. His aim is to have interviewed 1,000 people by 2028.

He wants the final project to be available in as many languages as possible and says that he is relying on human translations as “AI does not understand certain languages, or what certain nuances might mean.”

Initially, some of his subjects were hesitant, he said. When he went to interview one group in Ikorodu, Lagos State, they told Afegbua that their ancestors had said to never share these stories.

Afegbua went with a slideshow to explain the concept to the elders, and he said after showing it to them, “they were excited, they were intrigued, they want to learn.”

He introduced the elders to large language models “to help them understand how AI can assist with storytelling, memory recall, and structuring ideas.”

He also showed them how AI can be used with photos, videos and audio recordings from their phones to help “refine stories, generate transcripts, expand memories into written narratives, or structure content in ways that could be shared more broadly.”

The interviews initially focused on “normal life,” he said, before he began to ask about their individual experiences, to find out “what really happened in a certain time.”

Afegbua said he had to be careful around sensitive topics like the Nigerian Civil War (from 1967 to 1970). “The majority were hesitant — some said outright they didn’t want to talk about it,” he recalled. He has plans to “address the war directly” through interviews with people personally affected, but “the trauma is still very present. We never push.”

Afegbua previously earned international attention from another project focusing on elderly people. In his 2023 work “The Elders Series”, he used AI to generate images of older Africans on the catwalk.

Where LegacyLink aims to preserve the knowledge of living people, Afegbua is also working on a visual project to restore the past — using AI to recreate African heritage sites that have been lost, destroyed, or are no longer accessible.

For the ReMemory project, Afegbua bases his AI recreations on historical records and academic studies. Once the work is completed, users will be able to navigate the sites on their phone or computer, as well as through virtual reality.

The idea grew out of a project he did at the Kofar Mata dye pits in Kano, Nigeria, which have been operating for five centuries and made the city famous for its traditional indigo dyed cloth. Insecurity in the region means that some people do not want to go there, Afegbua said, so he made a VR film of the traditional pits, “in case it does die out.”

He first plans to virtually reconstruct the walls of the historical city of Benin. Built between the 7th and 14th centuries, these 18-meter-tall (59 feet) earthworks encircled the city, in present day Nigeria, running for over 1,200 kilometers (746 miles). Though some sections remain, most of the walls have fallen into disrepair.

Though there are diagrams and descriptions of the walls, there are gaps in the historical records, Afegbua says, but he is trying to get “as close as I can.”

While both projects have a long way to go, they feed into Afegbua’s mission of using AI to “restore languages, artifacts, symbols … so you could actually experience it.”