With much of Africa’s cultural heritage still held outside the continent and restitutions in Europe moving slowly, a South African video game imagines bringing these artifacts home.

South African game studio Nyamakop has launched Relooted, a strategy and stealth video game set in 2099. Players break into European museums to recover 70 African artifacts and return them to the Museum of Black Civilizations in Dakar, Senegal. The title, which means “reclaimed,” deliberately references the continent’s colonial history.

In the game, Nomali, a scientist and athlete, is sent on her mission by her grandmother, Professor Grace, an artifact expert who has discovered that treaties meant to regulate the restitution of cultural objects were never honored. Joined by her brother Trevor, Nomali assembles a multidisciplinary team, including a hacker, a mathematician and an acrobat, to solve puzzles and infiltrate museums without using violence.

The objects to be recovered are real: the Benin Bronzes, Cameroonian sculptures, a sacred Kenyan burial artifact and the Broken Hill Man, a skull discovered in Zambia and held at the Natural History Museum in London. “Relooted aims above all to raise awareness of African culture and history, and of the scale of the looting of cultural objects,” Ben Myres, CEO of Nyamakop, said, as cited by Brut Afrique.

When fiction says what diplomacy has not done enough

Relooted comes as the African video game industry is establishing itself as one of the fastest growing gaming markets in the world. According to a report published in February 2025 by African digital games publisher Carry1st and gaming market data firm Newzoo, the African gaming market reached $1.8 billion in 2024, growing 12.4% compared with 2023, six times the global average.

The continent now has 349 million gamers, with nearly 90% playing on mobile, highlighting an ecosystem that has largely bypassed traditional gaming platforms. Yet most titles played in Africa are still developed for foreign audiences, and local cultural representation remains limited.

This growth contrasts with the continued absence of African heritage in European museums. According to estimates from the French Ministry of Culture in 2020, between 85% and 90% of African cultural heritage is held outside the continent. In France alone, art historian Claire Bosc-Tiessé estimated in 2024 that around 150,000 African cultural objects are held in French public museums.

A scattered heritage, slow progress on restitutions

Restitutions have taken place, but progress remains slow. The 70,000 objects from sub-Saharan Africa held at the Quai Branly museum in Paris, most of them acquired during the colonial period, illustrate the scale of the imbalance. The 26 works from the Royal Treasury of Abomey returned by France to Benin in November 2021 represent only a small fraction of that total.

In Nigeria, the bronzes of the Kingdom of Benin, looted during a British punitive expedition in 1897, are now scattered across more than 130 museums in 20 countries. Germany returned 22 of them in December 2022.

Félicien Houindo Lokossou