Relooted: the South African video game where players take back artefacts from western museums

Relooted: the South African video game where players take back artefacts from western museums Creators say they’re offering Africans a ‘hopeful, utopian feeling’ of retrieving objects looted by colonial armies A new South African video game lets players take back African artefacts held in western museums in a series of heists, amid a growing campaign to repatriate treasures looted by colonial armies. Players of Relooted become South African sports scientist and parkour expert Nomali, as she leaps and dives through museums to retrieve 70 real objects. They include an Asante gold mask that was taken by the British army when it destroyed the Asante empire’s capital, Kumasi, and is now in the Wallace Collection in London. Another object is the skull of the Tanzanian king Mangi Meli, which was taken to Germany after its colonial regime executed him in 1900. Hundreds of thousands of culturally and spiritually significant items were looted from Africa during the 19th and 20th centuries, when European countries carved up the continent into colonies. A 2018 report commissioned by the French president, Emmanuel Macron, estimated that more than 90% of Africa’s material cultural heritage was held outside the continent. In this South African-made game the job is to liberate African artefacts from Western museums Berlin’s Ethnologisches Museum and Cambridge University are among the institutions to have returned Benin bronzes to Nigeria , for example. Others, including the British Museum, have resisted calls to return bronzes and other looted objects. Ben Myres, chief executive of Nyamakop , which developed Relooted, said: “Real-life repatriation is enormously complicated and it’s been ongoing for decades, in some cases even a century or more … We’re giving people this hopeful, utopian feeling … of what it’s going to feel like when all these artefacts finally come home.” Myres started creating the game in 2018 after his mother returned from the British Museum outraged at seeing th...