Nerves of steal

A new videogame lets players reclaim items from a list of 70 real-life African treasures held in museums across the Western world. It’s time to rewrite this story, says creator Ben Myres

- Anesha George

Finally, treasures from Kenya, Ethiopia, Benin and more will return to their rightful homes... at least within the strategy game, Relooted.

Built by the South African gaming company Nyamakop, the videogame has been seven years in the making (and is now at the post-production stage).

“There is so much we don’t know about the history of the African continent, and so much propaganda we've internalised, simply because these artefacts were no longer there — to prove what African civilisations had been or to serve as reminders of what Africa had been capable of,” says Ben Myres, 32, co-founder of Nyamakop and creative director of Relooted.

The idea for the game came to him, he says, during a trip to the British Museum with his parents in 2017. “My mother was horrified to see the Nereid Monument, a 4th-century-BCE sculpted tomb taken from Turkey in the 1800s, on display," he says. “You should develop a game about this, to show just how much was taken by colonisers and never returned,” she said.