Home! Or is it? Can it EVER really be? - Dahomey Review
Dahomey, Mati Diop
A documentary detailing the 2021 journey a consignment of artefacts made from a Paris museum back to the West African kingdom they were pillaged from in 1892. Dahomey, in present day Benin. Home! Or is it? Can it EVER really be?
Worried about, “not being recognised by anyone or recognising anything” after over 130 years away, the nineteenth century statue of former ruler King Ghezo, or artefact 26, as it was labelled for this process of return, appears to suggest not.
Shown from the statue’s perspective and narrated in a voice that can only be described as haunting and other worldly, Dahomey (2024), vocalises the salient fears and actualities many descendants of the enslaved and diasporic persons of colonised lands have felt and experienced when returning to the continent of their origin.
“They have named me 26. Not 24. Not 25. Not 30… 26. Why didn’t they call me by my real name, don’t they know it?” These lines are uttered by artefact 26 in an inner monologue. The distress at the relegation of his name to ciphers attached by strangers striking at the indiscriminate nature of colonialism and the ease with which the identities and humanity of Black people were taken away.
A sterile environment resembling an archive, takes up most of the opening scenes, with white workers inspecting, photographing and packing the artefacts. Whilst we know they are carrying out an inventory for the purposes of restitution, the artefacts could easily represent the Black body, probed, mutilated and defiled to sustain the nineteenth century ‘advancement’ of scientific racism, and exhibited in the human zoos that pervaded European cities long into the 20th.
The cameras are placed alongside the artefacts providing them company for their trip back across the waters from whence they came. The fitting of the lid envelops the inhabitants in darkness. A box or the hold of a slave ship? The supposed end of the journey metamorphosises into the beginning.
Winner of this year’s Golden Bear, Berlin Film Festival’s top prize, Dahomey is the second feature film directed by French Senegalese film-maker Mati Diop, her debut coming in the form of Atlantics (2019). That story, about a group of men whose unsuccessful attempt to cross the West African coast to Spain sees them return to Senegal as ghosts, was Diop’s attempt to supplement and infuse nuance into the Western media’s statistic driven narrative on refugees.
Submitted as Senegal’s entry for the academy award for best international feature film and winner of that year’s second biggest prize at Cannes, Atlantics was personal to Diop, the daughter of an ‘immigrant’ father, as it afforded her the opportunity to explore the migratory heritage passed on through her paternal line.
Dahomey, with further exploration on the movement, whether forcibly or voluntarily, of people and things, is personal to us all. It juxtaposes with Atlantics, providing a key lesson on migration: when it is permitted, on whose terms, for whose benefit and the repercussions this has on safe passage or perilous illicit crossings.
It was on President Emmanual Macron’s terms and according to his “set conditions” that a miserly 26 of the estimated 70,000 pieces of African cultural heritage held in France, were repatriated to Benin, with him paternalistically declaring in 2017 that he wanted to see African heritage on show not just in Paris, but in Dakar, Cotonou and Lagos too.
The debate surrounding the restitution of African cultural objects looted during violent colonial wars of conquest quietly simmered for decades, before reaching boiling point post 2020. Some of the most frequently cited arguments against restitution, invoked by institutions such as the British Museum and Berlin’s Humboldt Forum, has been the internationalist belief that culture belongs to everybody and is more easily accessed in ‘global’ cities, and the axiom that museums in the countries of origin do not have the infrastructure or expertise to protect and preserve objects if they were returned. Ironic considering most are stored in basements, never exhibited and the statues featured in the film were frequently described as ‘cracked’ or ‘missing parts.’
Diop not only filmed the transportation of the 26 artefacts from France to Benin but documented what can be viewed as a symbolic transfer of autonomy and self-determination. The aseptic opening scenes in Paris compared to the bright excited vibrance of Cotonou embracing the arrival, the assembling of a university debate to garner thoughts on restitution and the fact that only Beninese voices were heard in the documentary, are all artistic decisions and creative choices taken to convey that: resolutions regarding the reclamation and restoration of stolen cultural heritage, including quantity, timeframes, appraisals, should be made in the country, on the continent and not in some European metropole.
Release Date: October 25th 2024
Directed by Mati Diop
Written by Mati Diop
Produced by Mati Diop, Eve Robin, Judith Lou Lévy
Composer: Wally Badarou, Dean Blunt
Distributor: Les Films du Losange
Runtime: 68 minutes