Tired of colonial artefacts being hoarded, Chidi Nwaubani and Ahmed Abokor use tech to redistribute them from museums in audacious digital heists

In March last year, two men in tracksuits, wearing hockey masks and carrying matching laundry bags, headed for the British Museum. Just outside, patrolling police asked the two strange-looking men where they were going. “We’re going to the British Museum to loot back stolen goods,” one of them said. “Well, we’ll see you in there then!” the policewoman answered.

But no arrests were made, as nothing incriminating happened. What did take place was a “digital heist” of one of the most famous objects in the British Museum, an artefact that is, according to Egyptologist Monica Hanna, “a symbol of western cultural power” and “of British imperialism”: the Rosetta Stone.

The journalist and broadcaster offers a refreshing corrective to narratives imposed on the continent by others

There is no shortage of big tomes about Africa written by old Africa hands – those white journalists, memoirists, travel writers or novelists who know Africa better than Africans. This genre, lampooned by Binyavanga Wainaina’s satirical essay How to Write About Africa , weaves together stories that exalt the continent’s landscape but decry its politics, that revere its wildlife but patronise its people, that use words such as “timeless”, “primordial” and “tribal” when explaining Africa’s historical trajectories.

Zeinab Badawi’s An African History of Africa is a corrective to these narratives. Ambitious in scope and refreshing in perspective, the book stretches from the origins of Homo sapiens in east Africa through to the end of apartheid in South Africa. It is informed by interviews Badawi conducted with African scholars and cultural custodians, whose expertise, observations and wisdom are threaded through the book.

Serpentine Gallery, London
From colonial leaders dressed in trippy patterns to a library of historical conflicts, this delightful show brings a welcome wit and rationality to today’s angry debates

It looks like a happy ending. After the disputes and all the agonising, Yinka Shonibare CBE offers a witty, weirdly beautiful conclusion to the debate over public statues that has raged since Edward Colston was toppled in Bristol four years ago . Except I don’t think Shonibare is interested in conclusions.

Queen Victoria, Winston Churchill, Kitchener – they’re all here, a gallery of famous and less famous icons of Britain’s imperial past. Their statues from public places in the capital have been reproduced, not monumental size but human height. They have also been removed from their plinths and brought down to earth. And each statue has been covered in the bright multicoloured Dutch wax prints that are Shonibare’s multicultural pop art trademark. These ravishing textiles, made in the Netherlands (and at one time Manchester) to sell in Africa since the 19th century and still doing a roaring trade, symbolise in Shonibare’s work the inauthenticity and complexity of culture and identity in a globalised capitalist world. Now they turn patriotic statues into something new and unimaginable to the dead people they represent.

The president of Guyana’s scolding of a BBC reporter struck a chord with many who feel silenced by western dominance and the legacy of economic violence

Caribbean nations have such a long history of economic violence, manipulation and exploitation perpetrated against them by the west that it is generally expected that they take it on the chin. Recently, however, their leaders have been standing up to a spate of condescension and sanctioned bullying.

In an interview with the BBC reporter Stephen Sackur, the president of Guyana, Irfaan Ali, displayed what can only be termed controlled rage. Ali scolded and schooled Sackur on the hypocrisy of the developed world, questioning his agenda and integrity. The interview reverberated around the global south. This was not the first time a British journalist had tried to patronise Ali. Last year, Richard Madeley, on the subject of slavery reparations with Ali, was outrageously disrespectful.

Poet who is curating country’s first Venice Biennale pavilion says ‘part of the heart’ of the country was looted and is being held in museums

An Ethiopian cultural surge – including a first national pavilion at the Venice Biennale and the rise of stars such as Ruth Negga and The Weeknd – is making the country’s calls for restitution of looted colonial-era artefacts harder to ignore, according to Lemn Sissay.

The poet and author, who is curating the country’s inaugural Biennale pavilion, where Tesfaye Urgessa ’s work will be on show, said the event would be part of a significant cultural push from the east African country and its diaspora over the last two decades.

From Puerta del Sol plaza in Madrid to Place du Trocadéro in Paris, guides reshape stories continent tells about itself

Dodging between throngs of tourists and workers on their lunch breaks in Madrid’s Puerta del Sol plaza, we stop in front of the nearly 3-tonne statue depicting King Carlos III on a horse. Playfully nicknamed Madrid’s best mayor, Carlos III is credited with modernising the city’s lighting, sewage systems and rubbish removal.

Kwame Ondo, the tour guide behind AfroIbérica Tours, offers up another, albeit lesser-known tidbit about the monarch. “He was one of the biggest slave owners of his time,” says Ondo, citing the 1,500 enslaved people he kept on the Iberian peninsula and the 18,500 others held in Spain’s colonies in the Americas. As aristocratic families sought to keep up with the monarch, the proportion of enslaved people in Madrid swelled to an estimated 4% of the population in the 1780s.

Fantasies about British exceptionalism have brought the UK to the brink of collapse. We need a new, realistic vision

Britain’s economic and social challenges are now so monumental that they require a response on a transformational scale. Addressing a failing capitalism and a society grossly disfigured by inequality and collapsing public services rests, above all, on a repudiation of the laissez-faire economics of the past 45 years. But the most serious failure of Conservatism is the despair it has created about Britain’s future. Without a feasible, inspiring vision of our future, we cannot reach first base – a revival of sustained growth.

The prerequisite for growth is investment that drives productivity. That is a truism. Britain does not invest sufficiently. But no business invests in a wider economic, social and political vacuum. Nor, indeed, does government. The heart of the right’s failure is that it has no plausible story to fill this gaping vacuum. The right, with its vision of Britain’s exceptionalism, rooted in lost 19th-century glories of free trade, empire and victory in two world wars, is grotesquely out of kilter with what Britain now is, how contemporary capitalism works and what vision might inspire most of our entrepreneurs and people.

Will Hutton writes for the Observer and is co-chair of the Purposeful Company

This Time No Mistakes by Will Hutton is published by Head of Zeus (£25). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com . Delivery charges may apply

The 20th-century psychiatrist, who saw violence as necessary to liberation from colonialism, is routinely quoted in conversations about Gaza. A new book considers the complexities of an icon

Everyone sees what they want to see in Frantz Fanon.

The anti-colonial icon is endlessly quoted by leftists tweeting about Black Lives Matter or Palestine. He is the father of ongoing efforts to “ decolonize psychiatry ”. He has even been invoked by the far-right conspiracy theorist Renaud Camus, the father of the “ great replacement theory ”, to support his calls for depopulating Europe of non-white immigrant “occupiers”.

Successive foreign governments plunged it into unpayable debt and left its citizens in penury

In December 1914, the USS Machias dropped anchor in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Eight US marines disembarked, sauntered to the Banque National de la République d’Haïti (BNRH), removed $500,000 worth of gold belonging to the Haitian government – $15m in today’s money – packed it in wooden crates to carry back to the ship and thence to New York , where it was deposited in the vaults of the investment bank, Hallgarten & Co.

The BNRH was Haiti’s central bank. It was also a foreign private corporation. Originally set up in 1880 through a concession granted to a French bank, pressure from America brought in US investors. By 1920, the BNRH was wholly owned by the American National City Bank. Haiti’s central bank it may have been but the Haitian government was charged for every transaction and the eye-popping profits spirited off to Paris or New York.