Dahomey and the Issue of Restitution

Restitution — the return of property illegally seized during war by one state to another — is one such tool, and Mati Diop’s Dahomey is one such film that effectively questions the notion of return: the return of agency and identity in general and of the looted African artefacts in particular. Through its revisionist and decolonial lens, Dahomey undermines museums as sites of colonial and epistemological violence.

The royal treasures of the Kingdom of Dahomey (now southern Benin) were taken to France during the region’s colonial period from 1872 to 1960. After Benin gained its independence, the issue of returning the plundered objects arose in the 1970s. It took France more than 40 years before Emmanuel Macron finally approved their repatriation in 2018. In 2021, only 26 of the 2,000 artefacts were returned, as Diop documents.

Monuments of barbarism

Diop meticulously traces the journey of the 26 statues in the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris. Cinematographer Joséphine Drouin-Viallard painstakingly and almost forensically shows the process of removing the statues from the exhibition halls, their careful packing in special climate-controlled crates, and their air transport to the city of Cotonou in Benin. The installation of the artefacts in the exhibition space of the presidential palace by a team of Beninese curators ensued. This largely silent first half of the film is followed by a heated discussion among students at the University of Abomey-Calavi, who express their frustrations and hopes that restitution can bring.

“Every monument of civilisation is a monument of barbarism,” Walter Benjamin memorably said. Furthermore, in her book Decolonize Museums, theorist and curator Shimrit Lee identifies museums as colonial institutions par excellence—a historical continuation of imperial violence. With few exceptions, they do not reflect on the past. According to Lee, they instead conveniently adopt an ahistorical position, supposedly objective but neoliberal, since their sponsors and board members are often connected to oil, arms, or pharmaceutical companies like the infamous Sackler family. In other words, those interested in maintaining hegemonic and capitalist power. Lee argues that such museums, located in former Western imperialist capitals, do not engage in critical analysis of their curatorial texts and statements, which reaffirms the status of the museum as an institution that, in fact, continues to support the colonial gaze. 

The can of worms

What Dahomey succeeds in is creating a space for contestation while maintaining a sense of ambiguity through its hybrid form, breaking the boundaries between nonfiction and magic. Diop extends her authorial voice to the statues themselves, particularly to the bronze figure of King Ghezo. Reduced to the number '26' in the museum's records, Diop endows the statue with a deep, almost bone-chilling voice. Speaking as if from under the lid of a closed coffin, Ghezo announces the time has come for them to return to their homeland. No longer objects, the statues become subjects of their own story, protagonists and narrators of their adventures back home. To work on the voice, Diop enlisted Mackenzie Orcel, a writer of Haitian descent (almost all Haitians are descendants of black slaves, most of whom were brought from the Bay of Benin and West Africa in the early 18th century). Orcel's poetic texts were then translated into Benin’s national language, Old Fon.

Not only do the statues speak, but so do the people. In her famous essay Can the Subaltern Speak? Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak argues that the post-colonial people, the masses, have no opportunity to speak out. They are either spoken for by intellectuals, from whom they are fundamentally different, or by nationalists, who often copy the rhetoric of the former colonialists. In Dahomey, Diop carves a space for many young Beninese to be heard by staging the university debate, in which dozens of students from various disciplines discuss the issue of restitution. 

One of the students laments that the people of Benin were in a state of collective amnesia, unaware that France had been storing their treasures all this time. “Restituting 26 out of 7,000 is an insult,” another student proclaims. He continues to say that France only wants to show its good face to the world. “At this rate,” he retorts, “the Beninese would have to wait hundreds of years for the rest of the artefacts.” The girl, with a trembling voice but full of vigour, reminds everyone that all the students were debating in the language of the coloniser. “And what about the sacredness of the statues? How to return it?” another young man rightfully notices. Following the animate statues of kings, the youth, passionate and bright, also become the agents of their history, putting into practice what bell hooks called the “oppositional gaze”—taking an active part in the public cultural discourse, reflecting on the past, discussing their cultural patrimony, and looking to the future. 

"Diop is breaking the boundaries between nonfiction and magic."

Shimrit Lee’s analysis concludes that museums in their present state–imbued with the coloniser's gaze–must be abolished. Their current situation only underscores the materiality of cultural violence and the sensitivity of post-colonial awareness. Diop avoids being didactic and prescriptive in her political cinematic manifesto. She does not explicitly question the present-day neo-colonial reality in Africa nor the role played by the Kingdom of Dahomey in the historical slave trade. The revisionist triumph of Dahomey, which snatched the Berlinale’s top prize this year, is in its elliptical and hybrid form, highly political and artistic. It provokes a host of questions about the decolonisation of museums as repositories of knowledge and culture, the ghosts of empires and the spectres of violence, and the present and past. 

Dahomey feels like an urgent step-up from a 1953 film Statues Also Die, a prominent work by the French New Wave pioneers Chris Marker and Alain Renais. The former is a powerful anti-colonial manifesto banned in France until the 1960s. Coming from a French-Senegalese filmmaker, Dahomey is a statement in and out of itself. While Western museums still hoard thousands of plundered antiquities, they will continue to be a battleground for activists and decolonial critics. Decolonisation is like opening a can of worms. It probes more questions than answers. The question that Dahomey left me wrestling with is how to measure postcolonial trauma, be it symbolic or tangible. Is restitution enough to heal the wounds of the dispossessed? How to ensure that artefacts do not turn into tokens of nationalism?