A buffalo at the Met, and a video game about stealing African art held by western museums

The upcoming heist game Relooted is an Africanfuturist fantasy, and it has already garnered some surprising support.

The Dahomey buffalo, as it appears in Relooted. Screenshot: Nyamakop

In the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the massive New York City cultural landmark on the eastern edge of Central Park, there’s a small silver figurine of a buffalo.

It was added to the Met’s collection in 2002, a gift to the museum from the collectors Anne d'Harnoncourt and Joseph Rishel, as the museum states, “in memory of Rene and Sarah Carr d'Harnoncourt and Nelson A. Rockefeller.”

The buffalo figure was crafted much longer ago, at least as far back as the late 19th century, by an artist in Dahomey, a region of Africa now part of the country Benin. It was “collected” by French colonial forces in the 1890s, changed hands since then and eventually was gifted to the museum.

Several weeks ago, the video game designer Ben Myres told me about this buffalo, as he demonstrated the game he is making with a team of developers from 12 African countries.

He was running a colorfully dressed character through a trap-filled set of hallways, as they tried to steal some art.

Relooted, as the game from studio Nyamakop is called, is a heist adventure about the repatriation of art and artifacts from Western museums, back to the lands of their origin.

“If I go to the Met, I can see it?” I asked Myres, regarding the buffalo.

“Yeah.” he answered.

“And if I play your game, I could steal it?”

“Yep,” he said.