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| Director Mati Diop |
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| Mati Diop with the Golden Lion in Berlin |
DAHOMEY B France Senegal Benin (68 mi) 2024 d: Mati Diop
For me, the most important gesture with doing this film was to give back – to give back a story, a voice, a language, a power, a subjectivity to these artifacts that have been dispossessed by their own story. So the first gesture was to make sure these artifacts stopped being objectified and could again become subjects with agency, with point of views, with subjectivity. —Mati Diop in an interview with NPR, October 26, 2024
From the maker of Atlantics (Atlantique) (2019), a film that won the Grand Prix (2nd place) prize at Cannes, the first black woman to be invited to the Cannes competition, though she was never graced afterwards by a single magazine cover in France, Mati Diop is a filmmaker that attempts to bridge the divide between Europe and Africa, while also establishing an ongoing conversation between the past and present. Working in both Senegal and France, her films explore exile and identity, also memory and loss, where history is always present, offering a provocative treatise on changing historical perspectives, where this is a film about recovering artifacts and archives looted by colonial powers more than a century ago, which turns out to be a time capsule of a time capsule. Dahomey is the name of a former African kingdom located in what is today the Republic of Benin in West Africa, initially founded in the 17th century by King Houegbadja, where the reign lasted three centuries until the French army routed and plundered more than 7000 royal objects from the kingdom’s capital in 1892-94, quickly becoming part of the French colonial empire in Africa (it still retains close ties), finally gaining its independence in 1960. For more than 100 years, the objects were placed on display at the Musée d'Ethnographie du Trocadéro (now the Musée de l'Homme), an anthropology museum in Paris, later moved to the Musée du Quai Branly – Jacques Chirac, an entire museum devoted to art from outside Europe, becoming the subject of some controversy, as these collections are essentially war trophies acquired through colonial conquest. During an African visit of the Burkina Faso capital of Ouagadougou in 2017, addressing the issue of art brought to Europe under colonialism, French President Emmanuel Macron became the first French president to acknowledge that colonization was a crime against humanity, making a surprise announcement of the return of stolen art to Benin, where he actually used the term “restitution,” a concept that set the gears of this film in motion, while also commissioning a wide-ranging 250-page report ("Rapport sur la restitution du patrimoine culturel africain. Vers une nouvelle éthique relationnelle") written a year later by Senegalese philosopher and economist Felwine Sarr and French art historian Bénédicte Savoy, making a public assessment of specific items that were currently held in France, laying out steps for the long-awaited restitution in 2021, Report on the restitution of African cultural heritage. According to its findings 90 percent of sub-Saharan African cultural heritage is revealed to be located outside the continent. Musée du Quai Branly, France’s largest ethnological museum, holds 3,157 other objects from Benin in its collection, while more are believed to reside in smaller museums and private collections. Mixing the political and the poetic, with most of the film shot inside museums, the artifacts date back to the reigns of King Ghézo (1818-1858), King Glèlè (1858-1889) and King Béhanzin (1889-1894), where the specific pieces highlighted by the film were part of the collection of Béhanzin, the last king of Dahomey, who was captured in 1894 and exiled to Martinique where he lived under house arrest. Despite a promise to right the moral wrongs, the reaction in France and other European countries has been polarizing at best, with each country devising their own plans, where museums initially drew up plans of return, but an outraged public has other ideas, where unfortunately it’s not so simple to think that stolen art just needs to be returned to its rightful owners, as the precedent-setting ramifications are enormous, not to mention expensive, like opening a Pandora’s Box, leading to a boatload of challenges that have literally stopped the process in its tracks, including the government’s recent move to the far-right, so rather than opening the floodgates of repatriation, only a handful of objects have actually been returned. The historical setting of the kingdom of Dahomey reflects a time when Europeans felt entitled to exploit African countries by virtue of their own alleged intellectual superiority, as evidenced by the wretched example of 19th century European racism on display in Abdellatif Kechiche’s Black Venus (Vénus noire) (2010), yet the historical, psychological, and political responsibility for undoing the damage of the past remains one of Europe’s greatest challenges for the 21st century.
Just barely over an hour in length, the backdrop of the film is this ongoing debate, where the film crew followed 26 museum pieces of art as they are removed from public display in Paris, carefully boxed up and sealed in wooden crates, and then shipped on a cargo plane back to Cotonou, Benin, where the initial rhythm of the film is established by wordlessly following this meticulous process, using forklifts and gloved hands to move the heavy weight during the height of a worldwide pandemic. We discover some works are on display, visible to visitors, while hundreds of thousands of other works are stored in basements, completely out of sight, existing entirely in the dark, so this film metaphorically brings them back into the light. In something of a surprise move, Diop adds a ghostly supernatural element to something she describes as a fantasy documentary, giving voice to object number 26, a statue that represents former ruler King Ghézo, given a resounding, deeply unsettling, Darth Vader-like electronically distorted voice-over by Haitian writer Makenzy Orcel, who wrote this part of the script, delivered against a black screen, like the void of history, as he assumes the existential identity of the art object in question, “We all bear the same scars,” he says, “uprooted, ripped out...” Bemoaning the time he spent in the darkness, as if in perpetual exile, lamenting the loss of his name, reduced to only a number, this voice of the ancestors, which does not speak French, by the way, communicating in the Dahomean language of Fon, is outraged that he was ripped away from its rightful place of honor in Dahomey, with glowing memories of a proud African kingdom, while becoming increasing excited at the idea of returning to his homeland, saying at the very end, “Within me resonates infinity.” Breaking free of convention in the format itself, this adds a disturbing element, literally personalizing the pain and anguish of the artifacts themselves, giving them a conscious life of their own, clear evidence of a deep historical scar that is difficult to heal, where the historical treasures become the lead characters of the film, having their own history, which becomes part of the overall story. In this manner, Diop references Alain Resnais and Chris Marker’s 30-minute essay film STATUES ALSO DIE (1953), with its scathing rebuke of colonialism, focusing on how African artifacts lose their cultural and spiritual significance when displayed in Western museums, stripped of their original contexts, causing the film to be banned in France when it was released, not screened in its entirety until 1968, now available on YouTube, Les Statues Meurent Aussi (Sub Ita) - Présence Africaine YouTube (30:03), where the directors were struck by the fact that African art was exhibited at the ethnological Musée de l'Homme, and not in the more prestigious national art museum of the Louvre. Shot in a cinéma vérité style by Joséphine Drouin-Viallard, while also introducing keyboardist Wally Badarou from Benin, with experimental sounds added by Dean Blunt, a British/Nigerian artist, the film was awarded the Golden Bear (1st place) at the Berlin Film Festival of 2024, the second year in a row a documentary was awarded the top prize. One thing this film makes painfully clear is that museums have a moral obligation to repatriate questionably acquired objects from their collections, becoming part of a recent pattern of European nations returning invaluable African artworks to their rightful owners, suggesting history is ever-changing and not a fixed understanding, and just like there are new political regimes bringing in their own set of ideas, there are always new perspectives that bring different historical understandings to light. Diop takes no side and offers no clear answers, as the film’s greatest strength may be its ambiguity. One thing that is not in dispute is that the slave trade uprooted actual people from the African continent, with more than 13 million kidnapped Africans enslaved or transported across the Atlantic, a heinous practice that lasted more than 300 years, so it was not just art objects that were stolen, as so many lives, families, and ancient cultures were lost or destroyed in the process, yet European museums continue to celebrate the African legacy, turning a blind eye to their own nation’s complicity in the destruction of those same cultures they are publicly celebrating.
The film is shot in three parts, the first being the preparation for transport taking place in a lower level basement beneath the museum, which introduces the historical artifacts, where the director was struck by how this resembled a funeral sequence, where the underground of the museum is depicted as a prison or a morgue, reflective of the colonial gaze that has morbidly enclosed these artifacts. This is followed by the arrival in Benin, where they are placed on display for a public exhibition within the presidential palace, prepared by a team of curators from Benin including Calixte Biah, a curator brought in by the Beninese government who supervised the transport from France, and Alain Godonou, who is arranging this new exhibition. What were mere museum exhibits in Paris take on the mantle of being treasures in Benin, leading to an animated debate on how young people in Benin view the restitution of the treasures, which takes place at an auditorium at the University of Abomey-Calavi. “Restituting 26 works out of 7,000 is an insult,” one student says, “What about the rest?” Some remain skeptical, “The aim is not to make people in Benin happy. The aim is to gratify France.” One impassioned young woman claims it’s insulting that 90% of Benin’s cultural heritage is still in museums abroad, while another laments, “What was looted more than a century ago is our soul.” Many seem to express the view that this small gesture is late in coming, and smacks of arrogance, part of a cynical public relations campaign led by Benin President Patrice Talon and French President Macron, as France is dead-set on keeping most of what they stole a century ago, yet they have to acknowledge the irony of having this spirited debate in French, which remains the official language in Benin since colonial times, remaining sensitive to the fact their own history has been erased by such prolonged European rule, as not everyone can even speak their own indigenous language of old Fon anymore, used by roughly one-sixth of Benin’s population. The final phase includes the reaction from patrons at the public exhibition at the palace, reuniting the people of Benin with their lost treasures, which is an extension of the student debates, as there are multi-faceted ideas on what this means to Africans, who have a completely different view of these works than patrons of Western museums, offering an African perspective on the black experience, as these reference their ancestors, establishing a more personal connection. Justice is disputed, questioning whether the colonizer is being benevolent or still holding power over the colonized. The voices of youth are especially prominent, a diverse mix offering a variety of opinions whose views are typically overridden by political leaders who presume to speak for them, but their voices feel like a breath of fresh air, given a spontaneous energy the film otherwise lacks. In this manner, Diop takes the idea of repatriation and reappropriates it in a way seldom heard, becoming the heart and soul of the film, as it’s their future they’re speaking about, where cultural heritage is an invaluable aspect of cultural identity and real independence. Diop chose to broadcast the debate over the campus radio, as we see various people listening to it on their phones and laptops around the city, where we, the viewers, are the larger audience, a technique that was similarly used in Abderrahmane Sissako’s film BAMAKO (2006), where truth and reconciliation committee hearings putting war criminals on trial were publicly recorded, allowing the public to see and hear all the eye witness testimony. The future management of African cultural heritage by African countries will be a challenging process, as Beninese officials say they need time to build a museum for the treasures as well as hundreds of other artifacts. Security issues are a concern, as theft and terrorist targets are something governments have not always addressed, while storage is also an issue, as proper temperature and humidity levels must be regulated, so there's all kinds of things they need to figure out, which is understandable, but that cannot be an argument against restitution. Diop really has her finger on contemporary issues linking the two continents together.
Postscript
What the film doesn’t address is Africa’s own role in the slave trade, including that of the ancient Dahomey kingdom, where some of the fighters who fought the French were female warriors called Amazons, with Dahomey described in Stanley B. Alpern’s 1998 book Black Sparta: The Women Warriors of Dahomey as a highly militaristic society, perhaps more than any other African state, that “was dedicated to warfare and slave-trading,” trading slaves to the British for guns, which is how they armed themselves with superior weaponry. The French looting was by no means unique, as African cultural heritage objects were appropriated by French, British, German, Portuguese, Spanish, and Belgian forces during 18th and 19th century, where public galleries and museums in Europe and North America, including cultural centers and academic institutions, are filled with looted artifacts stolen during the colonial wars or obtained through dubious circumstances, from the British Museum (69,000 objects from sub-Saharan Africa) to the Weltmuseum of Vienna (37,000), to the Musée Royal de l’Afrique Centrale in Belgium (180,000), to Berlin’s Humboldt Forum (75,000), to the Musée du quai Branly-Jacques Chirac (70,000). It’s also clear that the citizens of Benin are hugely skeptical of multi-millionaire President Patrice Talon’s government (his family profited from the slave trade before becoming interpreters and accountants for their colonial rulers), which may have their own intentions, as they borrowed $22.5 million dollars from the French Development Agency to help fund the construction of several new museums to house the returned treasures in a bid to make culture and tourism a new economic model. This burden of debt is the neocolonial model, as it continues to pour African wealth into foreign interest payments and away from needed public services, as Benin has a 38.5% poverty index, ranked 166 out of 191 countries, where nearly 83% of households are unable to afford a healthy diet, Benin country strategic plan (2024–2027). African museums are by-products of colonization and are, in many ways, still exclusionary and elitist. Once regarded as one of West Africa’s beacons of democracy following its move away from Marxist–Leninism after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the encroaching autocracy on display during Patrice Talon’s presidency over the past seven years has caused many observers to worry about the country’s trajectory (Neoliberalism and apathy in Benin | Africa at LSE).
