Dahomey Poster Photo: IMDB Dahomey Poster Photo: IMDB In Mati Diop’s Dahomey (2024)game ape, colonial spoils being returned to their land of origin after a century is surveyed in its heated political register. Its central act of restitution of 26 Beninese artefacts by France is, of course, not an innocent one. There are many, clashing implications to reckon with.Diop creates a sly, fantastical space where a statue of King Gezo, who ruled the kingdom of Dahomey on Benin’s Atlantic coast in the 1800s, is imbued with a voice that rips through the darkness of encasing.
In November 2021, 26 royal treasures, looted by the French colonisers, were sent back to Benin. Diop tracks at close quarters the route of movement. As we watch the artefacts being hauled around and into boxes and stowed onto ships, the wooden statue of the king starts speaking (Makenzy Orcel in Fon language). There’s an almost spectral edge to his voice, tweaked by sound designers Corneille Houssou, Nicolas Becker and Cyril Holz. The king is cognisant of the other artefacts being shipped back home. But he also articulates deep anxieties, “torn between the fear of not recognising anything and not being recognised” on reaching what’d be called home. “Uprooted, we all bear the same scars”-the voice knits together a community of the historically displaced.
The artefacts are met in Benin with euphoria and celebration. But the statue talks of being disoriented. Everything seems and feels unfamiliar, with the figures being housed in sleek museums. Landscapes, that should have felt like home, feels distinctly alien. While Dahomey floats alongside the statues in a hushed, intimate manner, often turning to positioning and arrangement in museum spaces, the documentary marshals terrific energy of thought and contemplation in scenes of debate among university students.
This section carries an impassioned energy that grounds the film. One woman passionately remarks she couldn’t stop crying seeing the artefacts. It is not just a patriotic act to go see them, she exhorts. Others are cynical about the restitutions. Could it just be an exercise by France in promoting their image? Isn’t it an insult that only 26 of the pillaged artefacts, that are in thousands, have been returned?
A Still from Dahomey Photo: IMDB A Still from Dahomey Photo: IMDBThe exultation with which the artefacts are greeted in a parade is quickly offset by sobering meditations. Several responses and interpretations of the act of restitution, whose historicity is plastered in every public space by the government, emerge with urgency and piercing inquisitiveness. To every individual’s ecstatic commemoration of the restitutions, there are often humbling rebuttals.
Diop’s camera allows equal credence to all sides of the table. Each opinion must be listened to, weighed for what they believe in with complete earnestness. These opinions are carefully considered, bearing the onus of a national, public memory. Diop prioritizes deep attention and mindful dialogue, even if there are strains of disagreement. These artefacts are politically, historically loaded vessels, marking out the equation between the coloniser and colonised as mapped intergenerationally.
Dahomey strikes its calm, centring, rationalising force as cutting through all the jostling strands of thought. It’s a panoply of perspectives which we are presented with. Each is held as valid, even if one may not necessarily be congruent with the other. One of the students points out all the laudations for the restitution can’t be directed to Benin’s president, Patrice Talon. “The return is the materialisation of bygone revolts”-the sentiment harks back to the power of local resistance in the past and present that has pushed the powers that be to listen.
Emphatically, Dahomey sweeps into focus the other, many languages that got enslaved under the European grip. The retrieval of statues must also be recognised as what they were originally intended for, as rituals of worship. Putting the artefacts away in museums, a Western concept, as one puts it, only serves to de-sacralise them. Dahomey is a potent reclamation. People’s souls were looted, someone says. Through a keen, searching sense of enquiry, Diop revitalises objects and histories that risk erasure and oblivion, forging invigorating conversation between the ancestral and the youth.
Dahomey is now streaming on Mubi.
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