AfI Fest 2024: Dahomey

Evan D.

Colonization leaves an echo. Hundreds of years later, after the damage that has been inflicted, after the invaders have been driven out the fallout reverberates. Native languages whither, replaced by imperial tongue and cultural treasures — art, statues, sculptures — remain captive in museums around the world. For years, even before her feature debut Atlantics, director Mati Diop had been planning to interrogate the repatriation of these looted treasures. In 2021 she got her chance as France agreed to return 26 artifacts to the Republic of Benin, formerly the Kingdom of Dahomey.

With Dahomey, Diop tracks the journey of these 26 Beninese works from the French museum that has held them captive to their new home in their ancestral land. The treasures are given voice, haunting and guttural, speaking to what the experience might feel like to a repatriated soul. As we see these kings of Dahomey unceremoniously boxed up and shipped back home, we hear their musings about returning to a place that no longer resembles the one from which they were taken.

For all the magical realism of Diop’s documentary, she recognizes that the impact and legacy of repatriation will be determined by the young people in Benin who will be stewards of these treasures. In that spirit the director organized a debate so students could contemplate the effects — joys and shortcomings — of 26 treasures returning to their homeland. 

Diop’s filmmaking is lyrical, emotionally charting the journey of the repatriated treasures before they ever utter a word in the script. In the French museum white walls and watchful security cameras turn a place of learning into a prison for looted artifacts. In a startling echo of the plight faced by their human contemporaries the pieces are shipped halfway across the world and unceremoniously examined and graded. But these pieces are not back in Dahomey, the home they were stolen away from no longer exists and so they are settled in the presidential palace of Benin, complete with the same blank walls and cameras they left behind. What is lost in colonization cannot simply be restored by returning objects. 

It is in the debate that Dahomey really crystalizes. Often seen as an obvious good — returning stolen artifacts is obviously better than not — the repatriation of these treasures is a lot more nuanced. Should it be celebrated that only 26 of over 7,000 works are being returned? How much of a place’s culture and history resides within objects and how much is passed down in tradition. What about the intangible, language and generations stolen away unable to be returned? There are no simple answers but the debate is riveting and insightful into the colonial echos that still reverberate through Beninese society. 

Diop is not interested in easy answers with Dahomey. In embracing the tumult she finds symmetry with Benin’s colonial past and a path for a future where these treasures are back where they belong. In a beautiful coda the narrating statue, still unsure about its unfamiliar homeland, exclaims “I am here. I will not forget.” The damage of colonial rule cannot be undone, the time and people lost cannot be returned, but they also wont be forgotten.