Recently, some Western museums, under public pressure, have begun repatriating pieces that had come into their collections via looting. The process can be slow. In February, the U.S. announced that it was returning seventy-seven Yemeni artifacts—eventually. For now, owing to Yemen’s civil war, the Smithsonian was holding on to them. “It just happens in dribs and drabs,” Chidi Nwaubani, a Nigerian English product designer, said recently. Mostly, he added, “They’re, like, ‘Sorry, not sorry.’ ” Last year, in response, Nwaubani and a co-conspirator put on hockey masks, slipped into the basement of the British Museum, and reclaimed a few statues from a group known as the Benin Bronzes. It was the first heist carried out by a collective he’d founded called Looty, whose mission was to “reloot” heritage items. Instead of stealing the pieces, the group scans them in 3-D and makes them available as N.F.T.s in the metaverse. The other day, Nwaubani and his co-founder, Ahmed Abokor, were back at the scene of the not-quite crime. They had come for the Rosetta stone.
The men wore black sweatsuits and white sneakers. Nwaubani had short braids. Abokor, a Somali Swedish creative director, had a beard. The name of the collective was derived from a Pekingese that French soldiers had snatched from the Old Summer Palace, near Beijing, in 1860, which was eventually given to Queen Victoria. “She called the dog Looty, if you can believe that,” Nwaubani said. The group auctioned the Benin Bronzes as a series of N.F.T.s in May; one went for about two thousand dollars. (Looty gives twenty per cent of its proceeds to young African artists as grants, and keeps the rest to cover costs.)
For the Rosetta-stone heist, they’d invited along the Egyptologist Monica Hanna. The stone was excavated by the French and intercepted as a spoil of war by the British some two centuries ago. Officially, Egypt has never asked for it back; in September, Hanna launched a petition demanding that the Egyptian Prime Minister reclaim it—plus sixteen other artifacts. She arrived at the museum in all black, with red-rimmed glasses, red boots, and red nails. She found Nwaubani and Abokor in the Egyptian-sculpture gallery. “What is the plan?” she said.
The gallery was filled with likenesses of Thutmose I and Ramses II, a five-foot-long scarab, a bronze cat with a nose ring, and, in the center of the hall, the stone. “So, there’s nothing illegal that we’re doing,” Nwaubani said. He pulled the museum’s visitor rules up on his phone; they state that 3-D imaging is O.K. He had an action camera, the Insta360, and Abokor had a Samsung Galaxy Fold. After they showed Hanna how to use a 3-D-capturing app, Polycam, to snap the stone “just from every imaginable angle,” they equipped her with an iPad and pulled out the hockey masks. The rules don’t state anything about attire: “The only thing is that people may feel uncomfortable,” Nwaubani said. “But how uncomfortable do you need to feel to know that this thing is stolen?”
Their hockey masks were overlaid with plaid nylon canvas, cut from shopping totes. The men looked as if they’d previously looted a Balenciaga store. For Hanna, they had an extra mask that was plain white. “The guest mask,” Abokor said. Hanna frowned. Abokor added, “If you’re not comfortable, you don’t have to wear it.” She opted for a surgical mask.
The three stitched through the throng, up to the glass box. Their target resembled an ancient chalkboard cramped with writing. They raised their devices. A mesh guide popped up on their screens, over the slab; they hit record, and orbited.
An attendant posted nearby noticed right away. “Hi?” she radioed security. “Yeah, some guys are wearing masks by the Rosetta.”
“To think this all began with letting autocomplete finish our sentences.”
Cartoon by Robert Leighton
A buff guard materialized. “So, what’s going on here?” he said.
Abokor was cheerful but cryptic. “This is a noncommercial project,” he said. “We are fans of the art work.” There being no clear wrongdoing, the guard moved on.
Deed done, they left the gallery with their eight-hundred-and-ninety-six-megabyte artifact. The group planned to rendezvous in Egypt. In Rashid, a port city near Alexandria which Westerners call Rosetta, they would use location-based augmented reality to put the stone near its original resting place; passersby could view it on their phones, as if it were a very old Pokémon. “And it’s there,” Nwaubani said. “But you can only access this in a digital form.”
On their way to the exit, they paused in the gift shop to gawk at the exclusive Rosetta-stone merch. “A nail file?” Abokor said. “Who’s buying this?”
“I have a Rosetta-stone umbrella,” Hanna admitted. “I bought one on my first trip to London, like twelve years ago.” There were oven mitts, luggage tags, silk ties, and snow globes—she shook one—that seethed with glitter.
“Let’s leave the premises,” Abokor said. ♦
