The Dahomey kingdom was in the West African region from 1600 to 1904. It is now the Republic of Benin, which borders Nigeria and Togo. During the second Franco-Dahomean war in 1892, the French colonizers stole dozens of artifacts, which were decades later placed in museums in France. In the Musée du Quai Branly- Jacques Chirac, more than a million objects, such as statues, documents, and ethnographic objects, were compromised in its collection. The Quai Branly exposes hundreds of artifacts from Indigenous origins – robbed during France’s numerous incursions of colonial violence, in a movement of the imminent debate of the origin of artistic artifacts in modern art discussions. In November 2021, twenty-six of the royal relics from the kingdom, which were in Quai Branly – Jacques Chirac, were returned to Benin in a diplomatic action to ease some of the colonial wounds caused by the past French expansionism politics.
French-Senegalese director Mati Diop, who made her strenuous directing with Atlantique in 2019 at the Festival de Cannes, presents a mature and highly politically engaged debate with her sophomore. Dahomey is an effort that awarded her the prestigious Golden Bear at this year’s Berlinale. Diop maintains herself as a distant observer who interferes artistically to experiment with elements from the Beninese. She connects the religious essences of the artifacts, which once were voodoo ornaments to salute the king, to the feeling of misplacement generated by the colonial invasion. In this sense, the director gives voice to artifact number 26, a bronze statue of King Ghezo, narrated by Haitinese poet and writer Makenzy Orcel. Ghezo was the leader of the kingdom from 1818 to 1858. He questions the solitude of the darkness and the sense of being kidnapped from its origin. These are a few minutes represented by a black screen with his voice-over, which increases the connection to the public and to questions asked by Diop.
Despite its brief duration, only sixty minutes without the credit sequences, it provides an engaging and highly valid discussion. It surrounds the central debate in an academic conversation at the University of Abomey-Calavi, where a handful of pupils discuss the meanings of repatriation. It features the most direct proposition to the public, delivering newer information to the whole context and a broad range of opinions and divergent political views. Furthermore, they supply a large number of reasonable points to the discussion. The paramount critique is the celebration of the return as an act of charity, which is not true because the artifacts belong to the kingdom, now Benin. Also, the number of repatriations is another hot topic. There is an estimated number of seven thousand looted objects to a return number of only twenty-six. The pupils question the act as a diplomatic stunt rather than a genuine action of giving back what the French colonialists took from them.
Mati Diop thrives in providing a conversation that does not end in the bureaucratic approach to a dense theme. Even though Dahomey uses an academic setting to amplify its argument about the colonial impact on culture and identity, she does not simplify the importance of those subjects. Diop potentialates the propositions through her cinematic choices. While the academics debate at the summit, she intercalates their sequences with the community, hearing their discussions. The director contrasts the two publics interested in artistical repatriation: researchers and the general population. She weighs in on how it impacts their day-to-day lives. There is a pertinent attribute to the importance of public politics, allowing populations in villages and countryside populations to visit the Presidential Palace in Cotonou. It is inherent to the correlation between the knowledge of history and a sense of patriotism.
Another engaging point is the differentiation between material and immaterial patrimony. The first, looted by French colonialism, holds back an immense part of historical learning from Benineses. The immaterial patrimony, even though the French avoided the colonization of speaking their dialects, the dances, habits, and cultural expressions are intact to their culture. It aggregates to the exchange of all the different points of view that Diop portrays in Dahomey. While she goes back and forth between the exposition, debate, and narration of Orcel, the film shows different ranges of a profoundly complex subject in only an hour. However, Mati Diop provides an ignition point to the research and discussion of the repatriation of looted art in high-end European museums to countries in Africa, South America, and Asia.
Dahomey lacks the length to emphasize and develop its significant discussion. But Mati Diop’s directing delivers an observational documentary that uses different formats to engage politically on the call for the return of looted artifacts.
Dahomey recently played in limited theaters.
You might also like…
