In 2018, Senegalese philosopher and economist Felwine Sarr, along with French art historian Bénédicte Savoy, were commissioned by President Emmanuel Macron for two meetings in Paris with S.E.M Auguste Alavo, the Ambassador to Benin, before jointly publishing the disruptive Report on the Constitution of African cultural heritage, Toward a New Relational Ethics. This followed Macron’s announcement in his now infamous 2017 speech in Ouagadougou to “put conditions in place so as to allow the temporary or definitive restitution of African cultural heritage to Africa,” the first of its kind in French political history.
The content of the 252-page document ranges from defining colonialism as a crime against humanity, attempting to revive the history of restitution advocacy since the 1960s across Africa and Europe, and sketching a vision for artistic repatriation as a catalyst for imagining “new relational ethics.” Its publication has drawn equal criticism, debate, and praise from niches of scholars, artists, students, and across regions, with increasing repatriation efforts sparked in past years. The report is divided into three main sections: “To Restitute, Restitutions and Collections, and Accompanying Returns.”
In this context, French-Senegalese filmmaker Mati Diop’s second feature film documentary, Dahomey, can be considered a timely contribution to building out the visual archive of the report’s third section on accompaniment. The film chronicles the voyage of 26 royal treasures from the Kingdom of Dahomey (present-day Benin), initially residing in the Musée Quai Branly in Paris, and their return to Cotonou through the perspective of the 26th artifact and protagonist named “26.” The artifacts, pillaged by French colonial troops during the 1892 Second Franco-Dahomean War, are given voice and invite us to share in their existential trance on how this transit lives through and within them. Diop successfully captures this melancholic anticipation of return both in narrative and in the haunting yet poetic signature use of her lens.
Originally conceived as a first-person fictional narrative following an African mask set in the future, Diop’s switch to a documentary-style film was prompted by the Benin repatriation announcement in 2021. Instead, Diop opted to document the transfer and have the treasures narrate their return in Fon, spoken and written by Haitian writer Makenzy Orcel. Diop herself acknowledged her cynicism and skepticism upon hearing the announcement. She nevertheless considered the moment’s historicity—Diop is fueled less by a hopeful belief in Macron’s staged commitments or wanting to evaluate its success. Instead, the film’s intent seems to lie in the desire to spark a broader debate that can be generated on a social level within African countries and led by youth rather than monopolized by the theater of national governments, headlines in the mainstream press, and Western art institutions. The film does this by centering a 20-minute debate among Beninese students from l’Université d’Abomey-Calavi and their diverse interpretations of the return’s meaning.
The film opens with a still of a lit-up, miniature Eiffel Tower statues being sold on the streets of Paris before transporting us to the underbelly of the Quai Branly, the basement in which more than 3,000 additional works (and likely much more) from Benin are still held. The film alternates between silent, black-and-white surveillance footage of the basement’s empty halls, evoking the eeriness of a horror film while introducing the museum as an undeniably carceral setting. As the artifacts are packed into boxes by the gloved hands of appraisers and museum workers, the film locates its protagonist, 26, as a bronze statue of King Ghezo of Dahomey (1797-1818). Stills of the room draw attention to the machinery and manual labor involved in the modern-day repatriation process, making us witness the historical politics embedded in the choreography to and from material spaces. The camera is placed within the box as it is drilled shut and loaded onto the plane before cutting to a black screen is another stylistic attempt to force the audience into a more subtle relationship alongside 26. It is as if we are accompanying them and recalling the memory of yet another involuntary transatlantic voyage. 26 utters in a ghostly vocoder-sounding voice: “I have in my mouth, an aftertaste of the ocean, these memories whisper in my ear in multiple languages, all the weight of a past which I am the trance, the trace.” Diop additionally underpins the film’s spectral and fantasy-like vibe through a distinct score at the forefront of multiple scenes, developed by Afro-descendant musicians Wally Badarou and Dean Blunt, who have Beninese and Nigerian roots, respectively.
On arrival in Cotonou, the artifacts are shown being transported to the Presidential Palace, where they are installed by the appraisers and workers. Amongst them are anthropomorphic-styled wooden statues of King Ghezo’s descendants, King Glele(1858-1889) and King Béhanzin (1889-1894).
The film recycles similar scene compositions throughout, blending the superimposition of the people, geographies, languages, and spiritual forces coalescing to tell the story of repatriation without compromising a lyrical aesthetic with stark visual similarities to Atlantics. The scenes include repetitive, intimate close-ups of uncanny stares and touches exchanged between the artifacts and the film’s other characters: young museum-goers, museum workers, and Beninese appraisers. These were sequenced alongside repeating naturalistic shots as well as stills of ceiling fans and chandeliers vibrating, gesturing at the energetic presence felt in the return of the works.
Dahomey’s next section, and perhaps the heart of the film entirely, is a passion-filled debate amongst students of l’Université d’Abomey-Calavi, shot over two days with the university’s student radio in an agora auditorium. Diop organized the debate through a casting process, meeting with professors and students across disciplines with strong, contrasting political views and who were prepared to risk expressing those views openly. Taking turns with microphones in hand, we hear students express their takes: “I agree that the act that has been posed is historic, the country is so filled with banners it seems it’s all we talk about now, to the point where we’ve forgotten people’s bellies in this country;” “restituting 26 out of 7,000 is an insult;” “the objective is not to please the Beninese but to please France and to project a positive image of France that is losing territory, losing power in Africa.” Some applaud the possibility for historians and artists to reappropriate this story to produce their own work; others wrestle with the need to decenter the Western museum institution as the site of return, the importance of national education curriculums being taught in Dendi or Fon, or highlighting the practical limitations of such an effort being divorced from the very socioeconomic policies, investments, and mechanisms needed to make the artifacts accessible to everyday Beninese.
Each of these individual perspectives on the subject of repatriation can be challenged or supported, as can the debate more generally if one were to engage with the film as a source of pure political commentary on the topic. Diop’s aversion to including explicit ideological or didactic framing as part of the narrative arc may, in part, be explained by the unexpected nature of the film’s origin story being written in real-time.
The film makes its political statements in other ways. Amidst the debate clips, we see an interview of a Haitian woman visiting the artifacts at the palace, and mentioning the parallel between the repatriation of the objects and the broader global movement for reparations and return of Afro-descendants—this may have also been a way of Diop inserting her views. 26 refutes the idea of this “moment’s” historicity overall: “Where I am, should I be? I ask myself with certainty that this will change nothing to the vast present construction site that is history.” The closing shots of the film capture Cotonou’s nightlife cityscape with the protagonist affirmatively narrating: “I never left … There is nothing to fix, there are the dreams of the continent, the path that calls us to the end. I am the face of the metamorphosis … 26 doesn’t exist.”
To take Dahomey as solely concerned with the subject of repatriating Beninese artifacts is to misinterpret the scope of Diop’s target. The film itself returns the debate to the most critical population segment. It lets them reappropriate it on their terms while contextualizing this within a longer history of exclusion and dispossession. In between the debate exchanges, Diop also includes several shots of students in silence, taking in the proposed arguments, pondering, impassioned, unconvinced, and some seemingly indifferent. Outside the agora, we also see groups of students tuning into the debate via their phones, listening to their classmate’s political opinions. Capturing this collectively dynamic process of active construction, tension, and listening, may be the crux of the film’s archival significance.
More broadly, Diop attempts to emphasize a distinction made in the Sarr-Savoy report between repatriation and restitution. Restitution is something more profound, complex, longer, and that can never be brought from the outside. The exercise of collective questioning, critique, and debate with those most affected at its center is also how (as often echoed by Sarr) the opportunity of restitution becomes not just material but also a call for a movement toward the expansion of imaginaries across the artistic, political, and…
