Dahomey

Erika Balsom

In Mati Diop’s poetic documentary following the repatriation of artifacts back to Benin, a plurality of African perspectives and an aura of supernatural enchantment.

Still from Dahomey. Courtesy CMPR. © Les Films du Bal.

Dahomey, directed by Mati Diop, screening at Film at Lincoln Center as part of the New York Film Festival on September 28 and October 1, 3, and 11, 2024; opens theatrically in New York City on October 25, 2024

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In Nii Kwate Owoo’s short film You Hide Me (1970), a Black man and woman enter the basement of the British Museum, an institution built on colonial plunder. As they unbox and unwrap looted African artifacts held there in storage, a defiant voice-over questions why colonizing nations took an interest in collecting objects from civilizations they were in the midst of destroying. It was not out of benevolent appreciation. Owoo recounts how the forms of classification and display used in ethnographic museums established hierarchies that both devalued African cultures and invented the very notion of the “primitive.” He ends his film—banned in his native Ghana in 1971 for being anti-British—with an unambiguous call for restitution: “We, the people of Africa and of African descent, demand that our works of art, which embody our history, our civilization, our religion, and culture, should immediately and unconditionally be returned to us.”

As You Hide Me attests, advocacy for the return of looted artifacts is nothing new. Yet the terms of this long-standing debate have shifted significantly in recent years, particularly following the 2018 publication of Felwine Sarr and Bénédicte Savoy’s “The Restitution of African Cultural Heritage: Toward a New Relational Ethics,” a report commissioned by French president Emmanuel Macron. Only two years before, under François Hollande’s government, France had rejected Benin’s official request for the repatriation of objects taken during the Battle of Abomey in 1892, deeming them to be the “inalienable” property of the colonizer. In the wake of Sarr and Savoy’s findings, Macron gave a different, historic answer to Benin’s demand: the Musée du quai Branly—a Paris collection that scholar Aboubakar Sanogo has deemed “part of the unfinished business of decolonization,” since it holds thousands of stolen artifacts in exiled captivity—would permanently return twenty-six of these pieces to what was once the Kingdom of Dahomey.

Still from Dahomey. Courtesy CMPR. © Les Films du Bal.

Mati Diop’s Dahomey, winner of the top prize at this year’s Berlin Film Festival, is a chiseled yet generous account of what happened next. Across a taut sixty-eight minutes, this work of creative nonfiction follows the antiquities’ journey home, starting with their packaging into crates in France, through their arrival in Benin, to the assessment of their condition, their exhibition to the public at the presidential residence in Cotonou, and the discussions about them that ensue, particularly among students from the University of Abomey-Calavi. Notably missing is any account of the European responses to this unprecedented event; when Diop begins Dahomey with an image of tiny Eiffel Towers for sale on the sidewalk, twinkling in the night like the cheap tchotchkes that they are, she is making clear from the very start that, in this film, the grandeur of the metropole will be reduced to nought.

Dahomey is not a blustery polemic. Its aim is to chart the material act and political complexities of restitution from an African perspective—or, rather, African perspectives in the plural, for there is no single point of view to be found. The students argue with one another about what to make of the return of the treasures: some say the small number is an insult, others propose the whole thing is Macronian PR designed to bolster the image of France in Africa, and still others see it as an important step in the ongoing work of decolonization. Dahomey holds together disagreement, uncertainty, and hope in a way that somehow manages to be at once unsparingly economical and full of breathing room, rigorously devoted to detailing a process and yet unafraid to linger on a girl’s face, a whirring fan, or a lush garden.

Through it all, the sculptures radiate an aura of majesty and enchantment. They are the film’s true protagonists—not just in image, but in sound. Diop ruptures her observationalism with the decisive gesture of electronically processing the words of Haitian author Makenzy Orcel to create a voice that speaks intermittently in the first person from the perspective of an artwork, harnessing the philosophical potential of the supernatural as she did in her debut feature, Atlantics (2019). With poetic intensity, this other-than-human presence tells of deracination, incarceration, endless night, the wound of the Atlantic, the smell of childhood. It often speaks over a dark screen, a choice that evokes how the enormity of colonial violence exceeds what can be pictured while also creating the conditions for careful listening. We hear an ancient voice that is weighted with the trauma of history and, owing to its distinctly technologized timbre, alive with the promise of a future to come, in which the European fiction of “Man” would be fully washed away. Set alongside its words, images of wind blowing through white curtains or waves hitting the shore at night take on a haunted quality—one only amplified by the ethereal wonder of Wally Baradou and Dean Blunt’s musical score.

In his 2020 book, The Brutish Museums: The Benin Bronzes, Colonial Violence and Cultural Restitution, archaeologist Dan Hicks pushes back against the idea that the museum is a place of timeless stasis: “Museums are devices for extending events across time: in this case extending, repeating and intensifying the violence. But endurance must also always open up a space for something new to happen because each object, each photograph, each memory, each fact, each thought or thing . . . is a live event, behind the glass of the cabinets.” Rather than assuming, as the title of Chris Marker and Alain Resnais’s 1953 film would have it, that “statues also die,” Dahomey insists on the liveness that Hicks mentions, both by endowing the sculptures with animist expressivity and by attending to the relationships they forge with the various people who encounter them. In addition to conservationists and art handlers, museum visitors receive ample attention in Dahomey as they behold the returned objects, with Diop tending to film their expressions through the vitrines such that what is inside the glass comes to exist together in a shared frame with what is outside it. To conclude, she leaves the exhibition behind, venturing out into the Cotonou night, where people sit in bars and talk and dream. It might seem like a drift away from the story of the treasures, but nothing could be further from the case: the partitions that separate past from present, art from life, and reality from fantasy are exactly what Dahomey seeks to shatter.

Erika Balsom is a Reader in Film Studies at King’s College London. Most recently, she is the coeditor of Feminist Worldmaking and the Moving Image, published by MIT Press.