Mati Diop’s new film Dahomey reflects on the many contradictions of the postcolonial condition
Colonialism kills context. It kills a time and place through conquest and proselytizing. It ushers in a new reality – if not in the form of slavery and indenture, then certainly in the form of a new language, religion, administrative structure and education system. It also kills the worldviews with which certain objects, practices, social roles and customs may be associated. Haunted by this loss, the documentary film Dahomey by the French-Senegalese director Mati Diop, which won the Golden Bear at this year’s Berlin Berlinale, follows the repatriation of 26 objects from France to Benin. Diop dramatises events from 2022, when items of cultural heritage – including the statues and thrones of nineteenth-century Dahomean kings Glele and Béhanzin – were returned from the Musée du Quai Branly–Jacques Chirac in Paris to the Palais de la Marina in Cotonou, Benin. Looted by French colonial forces from the Kingdom of Dahomey (1600–1904), these represent just a fraction of some 7,000 cultural objects that remain in France as a result of its imperial exploits.
Diop’s initial idea for Dahomey came to her in 2017. Speaking at the University of Ouagadougou in Burkina Faso, the President of France Emmanuel Macron declared that new legislature would see all African objects held in France ‘temporarily or permanently returned’ within five years. It opened her eyes to the scale of the issue, Diop explained, admitting the question of cultural heritage had been secondary to other postcolonial concerns she had focused on until then, like clandestine migration. Diop’s first feature-length film, the Cannes Grand Prix-winning Atlantic (2019), showed how unfair working conditions in contemporary Dakar, Senegal, push young men to undertake a dangerous journey by dinghy to Spain. In Atlantic, the spirit world intervenes to extract justice for the drowned Senegalese migrants.
In Dahomey, the spirts speak from the start. Diop begins with the ghostly, cavernous voice of a nineteenth-century statue of King Ghezo (brought to life by actor Alex Descas, a frequent collaborator of Claire Denis) and he remains our disembodied narrator throughout. Now called ‘Number 26’ by the Musée du Quai Branly staff after his place in the institution’s collection, he knows he has other names but remains in the dark as to what lies ahead on his journey overseas. The statue is majestic and heavy: made of iroko wood, over two meters tall, and decorated with iron blades to mimic bird plumage. Diop’s camera observes as contractors, mostly Black and Arab men, carefully pack up the statue in Paris, overseen by Black museum security guards, white curatorial assistants, and the head of Benin’s Museums Programmes, Alain Godonou. This is physically demanding work for the contractors, and Diop’s sequence cuts a cross section through how so-called ‘unskilled’ and ‘skilled’ labour maps onto racial lines in France today. That, too, is a historic outcome of colonialism, and the migration once so desperately needed by a war-torn France.
When the statue finally boards a cargo flight in an airtight crate, his spirit wonders in the dark: “Will they recognise me? Will I recognise what I find?” King Ghezo’s surrogate voice casts a melancholy over Dahomey. These statues of Dahomean gods and thrones of Yoruba kings are limbs without a body. What happens to a sacred object when the society that once imbued them with sanctity has irrevocably changed? As the statue, and 25 other repatriated objects, arrive in Cotonou, Benin, Diop’s camera follows the preparations around the Palais de la Marina (the official residence of the President of the Republic), where they will be exhibited temporarily. Cleaners can be seen in the burning sun on the roof; handlers heave the crates into the building; gardeners water the grounds; catering staff prepare hors d’oeuvres for the opening. Diop centers the human labour that will continue to house, care for, clean, guard and preserve these objects, particularly before the pomp and pageantry of the opening gala that follows. The unequal social and political economy that facilitates the cultural sector in the postcolonial state may seem like a different conversation to the spiritual dimension of objects, but Diop combines them.
Cut to a lecture hall. The newly repatriated artefacts are up for discussion among students from the University of Abomey-Calavi, Benin. One bitingly observes that it took two centuries to get these 26 back; if he’s lucky, he will see a mere five to ten more objects returned to Benin in his lifetime. “We are conditioned to think there is no way but diplomacy on their terms,” he concludes to a round of applause. Laws regarding museum artefacts were, indeed, co-written by former imperial powers to guard their interests. For example, when independences across Africa were in full swing, the 1963 British Museum Act was passed to forbid trustees from deaccessioning its holdings. And while the 2022 UK Charities Act sought to facilitate repatriation, this year’s update has reinstated the bureaucratic hurdle of approval from the Charity Commission for even relatively small or ‘low-value’ items.
The students discuss the decision of Benin’s President Patrice Talon to accept a USD22.5 million loan from France to build a museum in Abomey and thereby secure the return of the 26 artefacts. Some question if he was right to meet France’s stipulation. After all, debt is a neocolonial issue. The IMF and World Bank’s twentieth-century structural adjustment programmes forced loans with devastating, neoliberal stipulations upon African nationstates. Given this debt burden continues to pour African wealth into foreign interest payments and away from public services, Talon’s move is up for debate. As another student pointedly adds: wasn’t one of the President’s ancestors an interpreter for the French anyway? (In fact, the Talons first profited off the slave trade in eighteenth-century Ouidah, then later distinguished themselves as interpreters and accountants to their colonial rulers.) Throughout, Diop leaves the floor to the students; passionate, articulate and informed, they understand the stakes of their own ontological and epistemic sovereignty.
Diop’s film invites us to reflect on the bitter longevity of colonialism by showing its audience the structural inequities left in its long wake, including the elimination of these objects’ original social contexts. The sheer scale of the theft, Dahomey suggests, remains unaddressed and unacknowledged, even when restitution (conditionally, or on loan, currently the preferred move of Western museums looking to mollify restitution demands) takes place. The Palais exhibition, filled with glass cabinets, security guards and ethnographic notes, and housed inside a government building, poses difficult questions around complicity and influence. After all, could the safety of these objects not be guaranteed without placing them inside a presidential palace manned by armed soldiers? Why not, as political scientist and historian François Vergès has suggested, ‘small, flexible and carefully thought-out sites’ that are ‘realised along the needs, desires and wishes of a group’, rather than building a ‘national museum pushing a political narrative’ (financed by the former coloniser, to boot)? Diop neither minimises the repatriation of cultural heritage as an act of justice, nor overlooks such contradictions as part and parcel of the postcolonial condition – the context into which these objects return.
The organic reactions of visitors at the public opening seem to echo these uncertainties. Diop’s camera observes children fidgeting, losing interest in figures they’re not allowed to touch. Teenagers take selfies and move on. Two construction workers sneak a quick peek but are shooed away by security before they can read the labels. A museum attendant absentmindedly mumbles a song in Fon as he takes in the shark-headed statue of King Béhanzin for a full minute. Is he spellbound by the spirit of Béhanzin, or has he been moved by some personal memory? Perhaps it doesn’t matter. ‘Ethereal things don’t function in spaces of bureaucracy,’ the Ivorian artist and curator Bayo Hassan-Bello argued upon the opening of the exhibition in 2022. But Diop’s twin concerns – of the spirit plane and the postcolonial political economy – can and must continue to be considered together. Context once lost cannot be revived. The task, then, is not only to restore what can be salvaged, but to reimagine the irreparable.
Sarah Jilani is a lecturer in postcolonial literatures and world film at City, University of London
