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

Rachel Savage, The Guardian

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.

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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 the Nereid Monument, a Lycian tomb from Turkey. The museum says it was brought to the UK “with the full permission of the Ottoman Turkish authorities”.

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Some such artifacts were stolen from African Peoples Before Captivity, who had interesting cultures.

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