The Artists Digitally Liberating Colonial Plunder

New technologies offer clandestine ways to ‘return’ works of art stolen during the colonial era — but also challenges of their own.

Chidi Nwaubani grew up in London with the vestiges of colonial plunder all around him. It’s all stolen — these people are thieves, his mother would say of the jewels in the Queen’s crown or other ill-gotten artifacts now “unwillingly held” outside Africa and elsewhere. On the other hand, he told me, during visits to museums in Nigeria, where his family originated, what struck him most was a glaring absence: As much as 95% of all artwork from sub-Saharan Africa, he would later learn, is outside the continent. 

In late 2021, Nwaubani, a product designer for corporate brands, was dabbling in cryptocurrency and non-fungible tokens (NFTs). He was struck by the potential of NFTs to create artwork with irrefutable, technologically determined ownership, a way to at least partly right the seemingly unending failures of former colonial powers to return what they stole. NFTs, he hoped, might also mitigate some of the historical baggage that accompanied those returns. “Imagine: You’re taken from your parents when you’re a child and returned when you’re 80 years old,” he explained. “Yes, it’s the right thing to do and obviously, we’re happy to see you back — but we’re also sad because you’ve come back different and the place you’ve returned to has changed.”

“We’re going to go to the British Museum,” he told me last fall, recounting the scheme. “We’re going to wear balaclavas, dress in all black, wear masks.” The target: hundreds of objects from the historic Kingdom of Benin, in what is now southern Nigeria, including some of the Benin Bronzes, a collection of plaques and sculptures looted by the British in 1897. 

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