A new South African video heist game robs museums to return African art
The World
Updated on
Picture this: We’re in a video game set in an art museum at night, playing a character named Nomali, who has just spotted a lavish crown through her binoculars. “We’re here for one reason, to get back what was taken,” the character says.
That is the setting of Relooted, a new game that asks players to reclaim African cultural heritage. The artifacts depicted in the game are real, though the museums that players navigate do not correspond to real institutions.
In the trailer for the game, a question comes up on the screen in big block letters: “Is it stealing to take back what was stolen?”
Ben Myres is a creative director for Relooted. He’s also the lead designer and co-founder of the South African game studio, Nyamakop. He spoke to The World’s Host Marco Werman about the game.
Marco Werman: So Ben, tell us, what was the inspiration behind Relooted?
Ben Myres: I came to dinner and just saw my mother, who was incensed with rage. She had just seen something called the Nereid Monument, which is an ancient Lycian tomb from the south of Turkey, and it’s basically a small building that had been dismantled almost brick by brick and moved a few thousand kilometers and reconstructed inside the British Museum. And I think she was just sort of struck with the audacity of stealing a building, essentially. And so, she very flippantly said, “Oh, you should make a game about bringing this back to where it belongs.” And I could never really figure out how to make moving a building out of another building very fun. So, very quickly moved to African artifacts, which has been a conversation on the continent for a very long time. But yes, as all great ideas are, they came from my mother.
Credit to your mother. So, who are the main avatars in Relooted and what’s motivating them and the players playing them?
All the characters in the game are not career criminals. They all have normal everyday jobs in Africa. And so, the character that players control is called Nomali, and she’s a sports scientist, South African, but based in Tanzania. The game starts with her having to help her delinquent security systems brother out of some trouble. She does that and then comes back to Johannesburg for the first time in a long time. She goes to the park where her professor, grandmother, Professor Grace, says, “Well, we should heist some artifacts,” and the Nomali’s like, “What are you talking about?” And then she sort of goes into the conceit of the game, which is a treaty that has been signed between, essentially, the African Union and the rest of the world, which says all artifacts on public display need to be returned back to the places they were taken from. However, that sort of loophole of public display is abused. And so, museums start only exhibiting things in private. And so, Professor Grace, who spent her entire career trying to get these artifacts back, “the right way,” says, “there’s no way. There’s at least this list of artifacts we have to bring home.”
Now, the plunder of cultural heritage, especially in Africa, it’s a potent topic for a lot of people across the world. It has motivated activists like Congolese Emery Mwazulu [Diyabanza] who said he went to a Paris museum and was arrested after symbolically trying to reclaim a 19th century Chadian wooden funerary post. Did people like him inspire you and the characters in this game?
Through the development and research of the game, we came across stories like the one you just mentioned, and that fellow, actually, we used as one of the bases for one of the characters in the game. And I think what we realized very quickly is that, as much as there are these activists and there are people working on this issue, it’s not a mainstream, widely-known topic and issue. And so, what we’re hoping and loving to do with this game is make it accessible to, or known about to, a much wider audience, because there are people doing the actual work of African Artifact Restitution. We’re just game developers. We do entertainment. We’re just trying to entertain and increase people’s awareness of this, rather than doing the actual hard paperwork, of which there is a lot when it comes to African restitution.
What is this sort of conversation you hope this game will spark among people who play it, who might not be that well attuned to what’s happening with cultural patrimony?
For us, we see it as a first step to learning about African culture, ethnicities and history. Each of these artifacts is so interesting and so fascinating that we hope people play it and be like, “Well, this artifact can’t be real.” And then they Google it or whatever, and they’re like, “Oh my days, this is a real thing.” And it might be near them, as well. And so, I think we always see this as an invitation to learn about the continent in a way that maybe not many people know. And then the second thing is obviously awareness of, like, when you see an artifact like this in a museum, it might have been dubiously acquired. And so, viewing these artifacts in a museum or on display is not a passive exercise. There’s a question you can ask about, “How did this get here? And why is it here?” And so, every artifact in the game, we don’t really force this down players’ throats, but we sort of present them [with] the facts and history of what this artifact meant and how it was taken. And then we sort of leave them with the lingering question, “Do you think this should have been taken?” And we let them answer the question without answering it for them.
There’s been so much publicity around the Benin Bronzes and the impact of plunder on former colonies in West Africa. What does the reception you’ve seen so far to Relooted tell us about the continent-wide concern over stolen cultural heritage?
None of it is new to Africans. Africans know these things, right? They know about the heritage that’s been taken. So, I think African gamers are excited about it, but the actual people doing the restitution work are sort of like, “Oh yeah, we know all of this. That’s cool that there’s a video game, but we’re aware of this work.”
Are you hoping that the very title, “Relooted,” which says a lot in itself, will attract attention outside of Africa?
It was a very difficult game to name for a lot of reasons. And the prefix re can mean to undo or to do again. And so, we loved a little bit of a play on words because the museums in the game are essentially looting the artifacts again, but the team is trying to unloot them. And oftentimes, when these artifacts were taken, they were actually referred to as “the loot” at the time they were taken. In the British Museum, next to the Benin Bronzes, there is a photo of that exhibition, and it is captioned, I might be paraphrasing, “the loot.” So, this phrase of loot has actually been used in relation to African cultural heritage for a very, very long time.
So Relooted, as a game, was well underway when the Louvre Heist happened. A thief stole $102 million worth of jewels, as we can recall. Did the mechanics of that caper influence your game design in any way?
It did not. I was very annoyed when that heist happened because if we’d known you just needed a ladder, it would have been a lot simpler game to design, to be honest. And I think we’ve generally had a pretty good response from museum workers who get the idea of the game. But the one criticism museum workers have when they see Relooted is: “What’s the budget for this museum security system?” Because we apparently have the most advanced security systems that museums would never dare to have. But I think the Louvre heist is a great example. I’ve managed to see some of the artifacts in our game in the museums they’re in, in real life. And it is funny how easy it would be, probably, to take those artifacts if you really wanted to. And in the game, we’re just drastically over- complicating the whole thing. So, it was quite funny when we have this like 40-step level to get one of these artifacts, and then in real life just a crane or a ladder would have done most of the trick.
Parts of this interview have been lightly edited for length and clarity.
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