112. In Relooted, You Steal Back What Museums Won't Return

It's the year 2099 and you and your heist team are about to case an unnamed high security museum to steal the Kabwe skull. This moment occurs halfway through Relooted, a new video game from South African game studio Nyamakop.

Your job is to map all the entrances and exits, position your crew members strategically, use cybersecurity techniques to break open the door, steal this artifact, and make it out of the museum past the robot security force using parkour, which fortunately, you're quite skilled at.

“Video game excerpt: " Please look out for the Kabwe skull. For many years, the Zambian government tried to have the skull repatriated back from the United Kingdom. What's the security situation? Nothing you haven't experienced before. Robot guards, lasers, security shutters, pressure plates, blah, blah, blah, blah.”

Several things about this moment in the game are unrealistic.

For one, the actual skull, which is currently on display in the Natural History Museum in London, might actually be easier to steal.

Ben Myres:  I've seen a couple of the ones in our game, in person now, and the first thing I noticed, is the Kabwe skull or broken Hillman in the Natural History Museum. That'd be very easy to steal. We've very overstated the security capabilities on museums. I have a video of, it's only 20 seconds long of the distance from the skull to the exit. I'm like, wow. Okay. That wouldn’t be very fun.

This is Ben Myers, the CEO and creative director at Nyamakop, and one of the developers of Relooted.  

Ben Myres: Hello, I'm Ben Myers, CEO, and creative director at Nyamakop. I like to be known for making cool video games.

But there is a very realistic -- damningly realistic -- fact at the heart of the game. The Kabwe skull is just one of about 70 real-world objects you heist during the game. And every single one of them was taken from the African continent and currently sits in a Western Museum or private collection.

Ben Myres:  I think there was a French government report that came out in maybe 2018 and that estimated that 90 to 95% of all African cultural heritage is kept in museums off the continent.

So the scale of it is like really absurd. I mean, it's hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of pieces. In like Western museums. So the, the major problem was like not, you know, finding artifacts, but which ones?

Mohale Mashingo:  There were so many artifacts, really. So many, but we couldn't put them all in the game. Otherwise, this would be the world's longest game.

This is Mohale Mashigo, narrative director at Nyamakop and one of the developers of Relooted.

Mohale Mashigo:  Hi, my name is Mohale Mashigo. I'm the narrative director at Nyamakop, and I like to be known for telling great stories, living in a fishing village and having a cute dog.

The Kabwe skull was discovered in 1921 by miners in the Kabwe mine in Zambia, then the British colony of Northern Rhodesia. The skull is roughly 300,000 years old, predating modern humans, and was promptly shipped to the Natural History Museum in London, which at the time was a department of the British Museum.

About ten years after Zambia became independent from colonial rule, in the early 1970s, the National Monuments Commission formally requested the skull from the museum. That hasn’t happened, and the museum's own display undermines its case for keeping the original.

Ben Myres:  So the Kabwe skull is interesting because Zambia has been asking back that back for quite a long time. And what was interesting about the Kabwe skull is it's surrounded by replicas. Like it's this sort of history of, you know, humanity from all these fossils and like skulls. But most of the skulls they have in that exhibition aren't. Real. So it just speaks to how like it's completely unnecessary for them to have that exact skull. When all the other ones surrounding them aren't real either. And most of the people going to the museum aren't gonna notice that anyway.

Mohale Mashigo: I've been to a lot of museums in Europe and have sort of seen these things, but they feel so out of context. You know, it's kind of like, this is the name of the thing, A very small writeup that it doesn't feel humanizing or it doesn't feel human. And then actually working on them in the game is, oh my goodness, this is, this is a big deal to a community of people and how it's taken is also a big deal. So being in a museum, and I love going to museums, it felt so disconnected, seeing it, but actually. Writing about it and learning about it was something entirely different.

The Kabwe skull is one of the higher-profile repatriation cases, but many of the 70 artifacts in Relooted don't have that kind of visibility. When Ben visited the British Museum, he noticed how the quality of wall labels depends on how much public pressure a museum is under to return those artifacts.

Ben Myers: I think the captioning around the Benin Bronzes is actually pretty good. They use the word looting, they speak about where it happened, how they got hold of it. But I think what's interesting is when there isn't that external pressure or awareness, the way museums talk about artifacts in the collection is not as great. In the far corner, away from the Benin Bronzes in the British Museum, there is a display of something called an Ndome shield

Mohale Mashigo: Yeah, Ndome shield from Kenya.

Ben Myers: From the Kikuyu people in Kenya. We learned — we have one of them in the game — and when I was reading about the research, it became clear that these are passed down from father to son as an initiation ritual. It's a deeply personal familial object and none of that is really mentioned in the caption. It's either consciously or unconsciously getting away from the question of why do you have this and why is this here? Because if you understand that it's this deeply personal familial object, you might be a little unsettled about it being there and being displayed in the way it's displayed

Both the Benin Bronzes and Ndome shield are artifacts you can steal back in the game. Before every heist, you and your team hold a briefing. Mohale and Ben built the game's artifact displays and dialogue to detail information about the object.

Mohale Mashigo: We made a very conscious effort to say, this is what's so important about this artifact. How it was taken and the repercussions of it having been removed from where it's from. So in many ways yes, it's like a digital museum.

And the fact that a heist briefing inside a video game does a better job at contextualizing these objects than the museums that currently hold them is another damning detail that the game designers didn't have to invent. In Relooted, you play as Nomali, a young woman in 2099 Johannesburg whose grandmother, Professor Grace, spent years trying to get stolen artifacts returned through official channels, and got stopped every step of the way. At the beginning of the game, she explains the Transatlantic Returns Treaty, an agreement signed by the world's powers to return stolen artifacts to African museums.

This Treaty is also fictional, no such agreement has been signed, but the way Professor Grace describes museums wiggling their way out of actually returning artifacts sounds very real.

“Video game excerpt:  There's an old clause in the treaty that uses the words public display.

“Basically saying all artifacts that are currently on display to the public need to be returned.”

“Museums are now using that old clause to basically remove artifacts from public display under the auspices of changing exhibits, maintenance, et cetera.They don't intend to put these artifacts back on display and are also not disclosing what they have in storage. They intend to have this on display for private viewings instead.”

Can't give back what you don't have.

Exactly.

But that also means they cannot report the artifacts missing or stolen. Stolen?

Who’s stealing them?

Us!

In the real world, these types of slow-rolling shenanigans are exactly what museums do. The British Government agreed to “negotiate” on the Kabwe skull in 2019, but no progress has been made.

Ben Myers: It's so difficult to get these objects back. It's so complicated. And I think that's what it speaks to, but it also speaks to the dodgy ways they were acquired as well. Like the Kabwe skull — at the time it was taken, there was literally a British colonial law saying, do not remove human remains, do not remove cultural relics from the country. And they did that and then donated it. So even acquiring the objects sometimes broke the law that they themselves had.

And the current UK defense for keeping the skull is that it's technically not human remains — it's too old to qualify — so the repatriation framework doesn't apply. So it doesn’t seem inconceivable that these museums will manage to hold on until 2099.

Mohale Mashigo: There's been so much red tape, just constantly. And I thought, what if even a hundred years from now they're still doing it and they're still finding ways. Because right now it's, "you don't have enough museums" or whatever. Or "we couldn't possibly hand it over because then we'd have to hand over everything." And even if they're trying to do something, there'll always be fishy business going on.

The setting of 2099 also allowed the game designers to do something that Mohale says is rare: imagine a prosperous African future.

Mohale Mashigo: Very rarely do we have an opportunity to imagine Africa in the future. And I'm talking about Africans imagining it. Often it's like some kind of lo-fi, scrapyard junkyard or whatever. People are suffering. The world has fallen apart, but everybody's got holograms and they're selling body parts. It's always something very gruesome when people imagine Africa in the future. And we wanted to imagine a future that suited us. It was a rare opportunity for us to actually imagine a prosperous, happy Africa.

One of the reasons the game works so well is because heists are fun, and we already have a shared cultural understanding of what goes into a heist: a crew, a briefing, a plan that goes wrong.

Mohale Mashigo: What I love about heist is the fact that the best heist works when it's like the little guy stealing from the big guy. You really want to see them succeed. They don't ever steal from people who deserve that money. They don't steal from hospitals. They steal from the guy who's got too many casinos. You know, he's not gonna miss it.

As a player, we certainly feel it. We’re not only breaking into museums, but also fancy private collections. The game does such a good job laying out the case for bringing the artifacts back that you can focus on the fun of stealing. And there’s a game design theory dimension to heists too.

Ben Myers: There's a great book called A Theory of Fun. And what they talk about is that fun is the experience your body has when it's learning. The human brain just loves patterns. And heists are just like patterns that you, as the viewer, are trying to figure out the whole time until it's revealed. And when you see the pieces finally come together, it's incredible.

So using the way video games employ patterns helps the gameplay: each heist is a little harder, but fortunately you're a little better at it.

But patterns also help the story: each time you learn of yet another stolen artifact from all parts of the continent, you start to realize the bigger pattern.

The museums in Relooted are mostly unnamed, relying on subtle or not-so-subtle references to real world institutions. Some, like Hans Sloane and the British Museum, come up by name, along with narratives about looted artifacts, enslavers, or investment in human trafficking companies. You can learn more about Hans Slone and the British Museum on episode 39 of Museum Archipelago, or by playing Relooted.

But there is one real-world museum important to the narrative. As you and your crew start amassing the objects, you return them to the Museum of Black Civilizations in Dakar, Senegal. From here, they are redistributed to their home countries.

The Museum of Black Civilizations was the dream of Léopold Senghor, Senegal's first democratically elected president.

Ben Myers:  the game for a long time was called Senghor’s Rebels because Senghor was the first democratically elected president of Senegal. He was a poet before he went into politics. And so when he became president, he put all this money into the arts in Senegal, but his dream. Was to always have this one museum in Dakar, Senegal, where he could bring culture from across the continent into one place. And he died before he saw what happened. But that is the Museum of Black Civilizations.

In Relooted, the game design team recreated the facade of the Museum of Black Civilizations, which at the start of the game is a vast, mostly dark hall. As you advance through the game and bring the objects back to the continent, a plinth lights up containing the artifact that's been returned. This cleverly serves the in-game progress bar.

Ben Myers: When I was sort of reading interviews and doing research about it, it seemed to be that the curators were alluding to the fact that the museum had deliberately, largely been left empty because they were waiting for all the artifacts to come back from the West. Ben Myers: Someone did a review recently where they literally posted a video of them visiting it and it was just this empty space. Even on TripAdvisor there are like two-star reviews being like, there wasn't a lot to see.

Relooted is a triumph. It's genuinely fun while also being one of the most effective pieces of advocacy for repatriation I've ever encountered. If you spend any time thinking about museums, go play this game.

Ben Myers: " Working on the game definitely changed my relationship with seeing objects in museums because there's so much about these objects that isn't like put in the captioning. And I find it deeply unsettling now to go to somewhere like the British Museum because I feel like I'm just surrounded by the sort of scale of looting and lack of information about how this stuff got there. So I, I feel like physically uncomfortable in this space and I can't really last. So, yeah, it was very interesting how that changed my relationship.

Relooted is available now on Steam and Xbox. This has been Museum Archipelago.