Everyone loves to hear about an audacious heist—from the brazen break-in to the breathtakingly narrow escape—but what if we were asked to side with the thieves? This is the proposition of Relooted, a new video game that sees a team of vigilantes reclaim looted African artifacts from Western museums. The provocative game puts a spotlight on several contested treasures, including the Bangwa Queen, the Maqdala Crown, and the prehistoric Ishango bone.
“It’s not just a heist,” claims one trailer for Relooted. “It’s a rescue mission.”
“Plan. Prep. Repatriate,” says another.
Players of the game are transported into an Afrofuturistic world imagined by the South African game studio Nyamakop. It is the late 21st century, and a fictional diplomatic agreement, known as the Transatlantic Returns Treaty, has long ensured a steady flow of Africa’s stolen cultural riches are repatriated by Western museums.
That is, until the addition of a recent amendment stipulating that only those artifacts on public display must be returned. Cue a rush to hide the looted goods in storage. Together with a crew of accomplices from different countries across Africa, game player Nomali will hatch a plan to take back up to 70 of these stolen treasures before it’s too late.
Luckily, Nomali is a parkour pro able to sprint, climb, leap, and vault to freedom. Some of the other highlights of the game include an opportunity to case the joint before the break-in, preparing an escape route ahead of time by solving puzzles, and strategically positioning teammates.
As press materials explain, all these efforts are for a greater cause: to reclaim artifacts that “are of huge cultural, historical, and spiritual significance to the people they were taken from.”
One of the objects that needs saving is the Bangwa Queen, a wooded statue from Cameroon with a storied past. It was famously photographed by Man Ray and sold at Sotheby’s for $3.4 million in 1990, making it the most expensive African artwork at that time. It currently belongs to Paris’s Dapper Foundation, which has lent it to several prominent international exhibitions including at New York’s Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In recent years, the Bangwa people have been calling for its return.
Another prized artifact is the sacred Ngadji drum, carved by artists of the Pokomo community and revered for its loud reverberations that travel down the Tana River. It was stolen from Kenya in 1902 and is currently in the British Museum.
The prehistoric Ishango bone tool was made some 20,000–25,000 years ago as an early mathematical tool that could be used to track prime numbers of the lunar calendar. It was discovered in 1950 in the Democratic Republic of Congo, but is currently housed at the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences in Brussels.
An 18th or 19th-century golden Asante trophy head, depicting a fallen enemy, would have once decorated a ceremonial sword. It was looted by the British from Kumasi in Ghana in 1874 and is now in London’s Wallace Collection.
The Maqdala Crown was taken in 1868, when the British army ransacked the fortress of Maqdala. A formal request made by Ethiopia in 2007 for the return of many of these stolen treasures was refused but, in 2018, the Victoria & Albert Museum offered to return the object to Africa on long-term loan.
A particularly interesting example is that of the long-lost skull of Mangi Meli, a chief that was executed by German colonizers in 1900, in what is now northern Tanzania. His head was taken to Berlin, along with the remains of his peers, and have since disappeared due to poor documentation. In the world of Relooted, however, justice can finally be served and Meli can be brought home to rest.
Other stolen items waiting to be reclaimed in Relooted include Djenné terracotta statues from modern-day Mali, Vigango statues from Kenya, Benin Bronzes from Nigeria, and Sakalava wood sculptures from Madagascar.
“We didn’t have to make anything up about these artifacts, because the history is out there,” Relooted‘s narrative director Mohale Mashigo told CBC.
Hundreds of thousands of African artifacts are still houses in Western museums, with some experts estimating that more than 90 percent of sub-Saharan artistic heritage was removed from the continent during the colonial era.
“Relooted” is now available on via Xbox, Epic Games Store, and Steam.
