{"id":490534,"date":"2026-02-21T19:26:14","date_gmt":"2026-02-21T19:26:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/490534\/"},"modified":"2026-02-21T19:26:14","modified_gmt":"2026-02-21T19:26:14","slug":"relooted-the-south-african-video-game-where-players-take-back-artefacts-from-western-museums-games","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/490534\/","title":{"rendered":"Relooted: the South African video game where players take back artefacts from western museums | Games"},"content":{"rendered":"

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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

\"AnThe Asante mask in Relooted. Illustration: Nyamakop<\/p>\n

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<\/a> commissioned by the French president, Emmanuel Macron, estimated that more than 90% of Africa\u2019s material cultural heritage was held outside the continent.<\/p>\n

\"InIn this South African-made game the job is to liberate African artefacts from Western museums<\/p>\n

Berlin\u2019s Ethnologisches Museum and Cambridge University are among the institutions to have returned Benin bronzes to Nigeria<\/a>, for example. Others, including the British Museum, have resisted calls to return bronzes and other looted objects.<\/p>\n

Ben Myres, chief executive of Nyamakop<\/a>, which developed Relooted, said: \u201cReal-life repatriation is enormously complicated and it\u2019s been ongoing for decades, in some cases even a century or more \u2026 We\u2019re giving people this hopeful, utopian feeling \u2026 of what it\u2019s going to feel like when all these artefacts finally come home.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Ngadji drum, which is currently in the British Museum. Illustration: Nyamakop<\/p>\n

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<\/a> it was brought to the UK \u201cwith the full permission of the Ottoman Turkish authorities\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cShe was shocked by the audacity of stealing a building \u2026 and she very flippantly said you should make a game about taking this back to where it belongs,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

A Benin bronze. Illustration: Nyamakop<\/p>\n

The game was created by a team from more than 10 African countries, while voice actors were hired from the countries of the characters that make up Nomali\u2019s heist crew.<\/p>\n

Mohale Mashigo, the game\u2019s narrative director, said: \u201cIf we were going to go as far as researching real artefacts, getting a pronunciation guide for the artefacts, creating these characters from Cameroon, DRC, Malawi and [more], I wanted to make sure it sounded like different voices from different places.\u201d<\/p>\n

A museum heist scene from the game. Illustration: Nyamakop<\/p>\n

Mashigo created an \u201cAfricanfuturist\u201d vision of the continent at the end of the 21st century, with cities and countries that \u201cwork for people\u201d, rather than the more fantastical genre of Afrofuturism.<\/p>\n

In contrast, Europe and the United States were intentionally made generic, as \u201cThe Old World\u201d and \u201cThe Shiny Place\u201d respectively. \u201cWe wanted to parody the way the west represents Africa,\u201d Myres said.<\/p>\n

The museums are also not real, apart from the Museum of Black Civilisations in Dakar, where players return the looted objects to an symbolically empty hall before they make their final journey to their home country.<\/p>\n

\"TheThe Kabwe skull. Illustration: Nyamakop<\/p>\n

For the game producer, Sithe Ncube, it was important that the Kabwe Skull, a 300,000-year-old fossil discovered in her country, Zambia, was included. The skull, also known as Broken Hill Man, is in London\u2019s Natural History Museum<\/a>.<\/p>\n

She said: \u201cEven before I started working at Nyamakop \u2026 I just felt like \u2026 someone should get it back and it would be cool for someone to do this in some form of media, in a game.\u201d<\/p>\n

Creating Relooted was an eye-opening experience, Ncube said. \u201cLearning about the scale of artefact looting in Africa, up to now I still can\u2019t wrap my head around the numbers. It seems quite ridiculous and probably underestimated as well.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A new South African video game lets players take back African artefacts held in western museums in a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":490535,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[49,48,61],"class_list":["post-490534","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-technology","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/490534","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=490534"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/490534\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/490535"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=490534"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=490534"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=490534"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}