“Tell no lies. Claim no easy victories.” In 1965, Amílcar Cabral—revolutionary leader, poet, agronomist—addressed these words to his fellow militants in the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde as they continued to defy Portuguese colonial rule by means of armed resistance and political education. A note of caution, it remains all too relevant. Seductive illusions of progress abound, whether under the guise of tranquilizing reforms, hollow DEI initiatives, or fantasies of decolonizing your cake and eating it too. As the vortex of global pandemic, Black rebellion, and sharpened class struggle in 2020 forced the hand of public institutions, museums unsurprisingly found themselves center stage in a scramble of transformation and pacification.
Museums did not precede a world created through conquest, colonization, empire, and genocide; they were and remain its consequence. Built to store pillaged objects and prove who was “primitive” and who was “modern,” their symbolic and material foundations depend on rigid hierarchies and categories. Where European museums are concerned, their coffers were filled with masks, statues, thrones, jewelry, carvings, and all manner of spiritual, decorative, and functional objects looted during the colonization of the African continent from the late nineteenth century onward. As it exists now, the call for the repatriation of these stolen items is at least as old as the independence movements of the 1960s and 1970s. What may be perceived as new battles are rather the most recent entries in an intergenerational struggle that has been significantly impeded—or arguably more dangerously, assimilated—by the very European nations responsible for the plunder to begin with, allied with an international web of capitalist interests and art world monopolies.
France has been a main character in this story of violent extraction dressed up as cultural preservation. It begins with early colonial incursions in Africa in the seventeenth century, and again in 1892, when French forces invaded and defeated the Kingdom of Abomey, stealing thousands of objects in the process. In 2017, French president Emmanuel Macron spoke at the University of Ouagadougou and promised restitution under a pretense of unprompted integrity, with no reference to prior demands made by African states themselves. The following year, a commissioned report by historians Felwine Sarr and Bénédicte Savoy asserted the now legitimized understanding that much of Africa’s cultural inheritance was violently seized and remains outside of the continent. In 2021, twenty-six of at least seven thousand objects pilfered in that 1892 invasion—including royal statuary, thrones, and altars—were returned with much self-congratulatory fanfare to their reconfigured home in the present-day Republic of Benin. This monumentalized historical event propelled Dahomey, the latest feature by Franco-Senegalese filmmaker Mati Diop.
Mati Diop’s documentary is not the first meeting of cinema, museums, and colonialism.
A sculpted, hybrid documentary, it follows from her feature debut, Atlantique (2019), a spectral love story and indictment of neocolonial labor exploitation. In Dahomey, Diop returns to a terrain of restless spirits, now situated in the hush and hum of museums. Beginning in the Musée du quai Branly in Paris and traveling to Palais de la Marina in Cotonou, the film tracks the repatriation of those twenty-six objects, chronicling an itinerary of social buzz, political spectacle, and cultural discourse. It creates a visual record and cinematic memory-vault for their return, as the scaly, half-shark statue of King Béhanzin, a rust-colored carving of King Glèlè with his lion head, and the imposing wood and metal likeness of King Ghezo move through the film as historical witnesses.
As with Atlantique’s hypnotic orchestration by Fatima Al Qadiri, the visceral pull of Dahomey relies on an original musical score, this one by Wally Badarou and Dean Blunt. Synth-heavy, it shifts between tinkling, choral, eerie, and ethereal tones, situating the film in a disquieting, captivating atmosphere of anticipation. Reading between Diop’s two features ties the question of migration to the question of restitution, a mercenary tennis match of people and objects whose movements are determined by enduring power relations of extraction and domination. While Atlantique plotted the restitution of stolen wages to Senegalese workers who perished at sea, Dahomey reaches further into the past to map out a scale of colonial dispossession that entirely exceeds quantification. But this does not make the documentary a mournful elegy to a sentence of immutable historical violence. It is instead an active cinematic reanimation and contribution to a deep-rooted demand for self-determination, resurfacing an intergenerational relay of cultural guardianship interrupted by colonization.
Diop’s documentary is not the first meeting of cinema, museums, and colonialism. Commissioned by Présence Africaine—the magazine and publishing house started by Alioune Diop as a home for Pan-African thought—Alain Resnais, Ghislain Cloquet, and Chris Marker’s 1953 Les Statues Meurent Aussi (Statues Also Die) leveled a poetic diatribe against the very legitimacy of museums, denouncing France’s colonial ravages. A point also made in Dahomey, their essay-film recognized that the creations recast as “African art objects” had been dynamic participants in spiritual and social life which, through their theft, were turned into commercialized and commodified pawns in a theater of power. Set in the Musée de l’Homme in Paris (the same place targeted by Resnais, Cloquet, and Marker), Franco-Guadeloupean Sarah Maldoror’s Et les chiens se taisaient (And the dogs were quiet) (1978), an adaptation of a play by the Négritude poet Aimé Césaire, connected these issues to the Haitian Revolution and importance of education. Multidisciplinary Black American storyteller and archivist Camille Billops presented her take on slavery and stolen cultural memory twenty years after Maldoror in Take Your Bags (1998). Through another set of Afro-diasporic geographies, Ghanaian filmmaker Nii Kwate Owoo’s You Hide Me? (1970) is a deliciously clandestine sleight of hand in which he used access granted by the British Museum to expose storage vaults overflowing with pillaged African objects. Together, this lineage of films frames the unresolved question of restitution in historicized cinematic terms.
Situating Dahomey in a long cinematic arc reinforces the documentary’s own call to look through a wide lens and consider the critical angle of African Cinema as another stolen inheritance. Not only the material archives but also access to research, distribution, and screening of films on the continent are still subject to Euro-American monopolies. While this might result in the recovery of “forgotten” or damaged works through restorations and recirculation, it is rarely to the primary benefit of African audiences. As authoritative institutions whose colonial credentials are hardly expired, film archives are not so very different from museums. Diop’s documentary may not address this issue directly, but it serves as a useful link to related efforts by African and Afro-diasporic cultural workers, such as Congolese filmmaker Alain Kassanda, who has been vocal around the imbalances of audiovisual access and restitution, or the Guyanese June Givanni, whose Pan African Cinema Archive represents an alternative model of diasporic stewardship.
From its opening, Diop’s documentary negotiates the fraught arena of cultural commodification by gliding over twinkling multicolored replicas of the Eiffel Tower and the touristic catnip of cruises on the Seine before the slow, studied cinematography of Joséphine Drouin-Viallard approaches the glassy display cases of the Musée du quai Branly. Patient shots reveal empty pedestals, glass cages, and the laborious, painstaking process of packing up the objects for return. Minutes later, an empty black screen focuses the attention on a voice, scratched and burred by confinement, that seems to speak from nowhere. It is revealed to be that of King Ghezo (1787–1858), identified as the “twenty-sixth object,” and sounding by turns commanding, melancholy, annoyed, searching, fearful, and dislocated. Scripted and spoken by the Haitian writer Makenzy Orcel, his poetic laments express a long, Afro-diasporic experience of uprooting. He intones: “I journeyed so long in my mind, but it was so dark in this foreign place that I lost myself in my dreams, becoming one with these walls. Cut off from the land of my birth as if I were dead. There are thousands of us in this night. We all bear the same scars,” and later, as the crates are loaded into the plane, “My head is still assailed by the rattle of chains. I have in my mouth an aftertaste of the ocean.”
By having King Ghezo speak in Fon, the language of the Kingdom of Dahomey—which is still predominantly spoken in both everyday life and media in the historically corresponding parts of Benin and neighboring Nigeria—Diop replays an earlier claim expressed through African Cinema: autonomy from colonial languages. It was cemented in Ousmane Sembène’s use of Wolof in Mandabi (1968), hailed as the first feature film produced in an African language.
Dahomey is linguistically layered, weaving a cacophony of voices to tell its story. Ghezo’s speech asserts an inheritance of self-determination, which opposes the longstanding captivity of objects robbed of their participation in social webs of kinship and left to a passive subordination to clinical art-speak. Metallic and sonorous, King Ghezo’s voice is also the subterranean subversion of the traditional, looming “voice of god” narrator, challenging sterile conventions with the lyricism of Orcel’s script.
It is hard to ignore that even with something of a resoldering of the connections broken by colonization, the objects are still in glass cages.
The play of language also orbits a crisis of categorization, in which the value and status of the twenty-six objects were disfigured and transformed by the historical process of colonization. What is returned could be called “objects” or “treasures” or “artworks” or “ancestors,” or indeed all of these. King Ghezo’s speech may seem fantastical in the museum context but entirely mundane when considering the spiritual life of their origin. While the items’ initial removal is now more broadly understood as theft, those responsible would likely have preferred to keep calling it “acquisition” and “collecting.” The weight of these changes is felt within the documentary. As the objects are loaded onto a plane from Paris to Cotonou, the camera enters the pitch black interior of a crate, and King Ghezo voices a common fear of the changes that accompany displacement and homecoming: “I’m torn between the fear of not being recognized and not recognizing anything.”
Through the first decades of African filmmaking—such as Senegalese Ababacar Samb-Makharam’s Et la neige n’était plus . . . (1965), in which a student returns to Dakar feeling like a tourist in his home, to more unusual riffs on the theme in the case of the vengeful return of elder Linguère Ramatou in Hyènes (1992), by Diop’s late uncle Djibril Diop Mambéty—the narrative of going back home has been turned over and again. The insight shared across these cinematic records and reinvigorated in Dahomey is that there is no such thing as a return to a clean slate.
Formed around this protean matrix of memory, the structure of the film avoids being overly schematic. Diop’s polyvocal documentary interweaves the trajectories of restitution and ancestral voices with those of Beninois youths. A vigorous debate set in an airy auditorium and moderated by assistant director Gildas Adannou begins around the halfway mark, during which students at the University of Abomey-Calavi intervene to complicate, demystify, and dissect what could otherwise be uncritically celebrated as an easy victory of these objects’ return. They, rather than solely museum or administrative “experts,” are presented as legitimate sources of knowledge and critical insight. The students discuss the motivations and meaning of restitution, turning over the stakes of their cultural inheritance. Restitution is reframed as a broad, sovereign claim on the living past—as one of them says, “the materialization . . . of bygone revolts,” calling these youths to the task of “giv[ing] back the life that was taken.”
Realizing that nothing of the kind had yet been planned, Diop herself organized this expansive conversation. While many of the students agree, the documentary’s edit does not homogenize but honors their diverging opinions. While for some “to go see these twenty-six works is a patriotic act,” for others the entire event is “a purely political event” or intended to “gratify France by showing a positive image of France.” A speaker who identifies herself as a film director defends the Beninois President Talon and tells her unsatisfied peers, “Start by accepting the little you have, then develop a technique to get the others back!” Many of the students put not only French colonization but complicit locals on trial, calling the return of only twenty-six items out of many thousands a “savage insult.” One of them directly ties in the role of cinema and cultural production by addressing the Disneyfication of his childhood, lacking in any transmission of their indigenous cultures and in fact severing that connection. Expressing the seriousness of these issues for young people in Benin, his words are not mild: “I grew up completely ignorant that my heritage, my culture, my education, my life and soul had been kept overseas for centuries.” Another student makes an important point of identifying the plurality of what constitutes a cultural inheritance, saying that no matter how much has been taken and stored elsewhere, “our immaterial heritage, our dances, traditions and know-how are still in our country!”
The experience of being taken narrated by King Ghezo is magnified by the students’ contributions, creating a vocal exchange across time. Dahomey considers the act of seeing alongside these time-jumping dialogues, a visual equivalent tracked through an exchange of looks between past and present. A sequence of grainy, gray footage from the museum surveillance cameras early on introduces the violent and oppressive qualities of observation. Footage from the celebratory opening at the Palais de la Marina in Cotonou takes the focus away from the political spectacle by paying scant attention to speeches and instead focusing on how the Beninois public meets their returned inheritance. An array of visitors, from small children—focused, distracted, dancing—to elders in traditional dress, survey and contemplate the objects. Many also take photos with them, creating a new historical record of contact. It is hard to ignore that even with something of a resoldering of the connections broken by colonization, the objects are still in glass cages.
In Dahomey’s interplay of seeing and speaking across time, the past looks back and talks back.
In quieter moments before this public opening, young men in vests and hard hats involved in setting up the installation pause in front of the statues with cautious curiosity. Most captivating, and bridging the aural and visual, is a moment which resulted in the emblematic still for the promotion of the documentary: a member of the museum team in a white lab coat and white bucket hat shares a whispered song with one the statues. In Dahomey’s interplay of seeing and speaking across time, the past looks back and talks back.
The students are not the only ones to articulate how this dynamic calls forth an intergenerational relay of stewardship over memory and culture. In an interview with BertinCalixte Biah, a historian and curator shown overseeing the process from Paris to Cotonou, he notes: “Well, the role I have to play is to pass the torch because I’m already advanced in age and there has to be a younger generation in whom we place our trust. That generation is already there to take up the torch.” Biah also comments on what is arguably the most tired alibi against restitution, namely that Africans do not have the expertise nor facilities to caretake their own cultural inheritance. This worn-out paternalism coexists with the problematic yet significant ways museums have been legitimized as crucial spaces in which people encounter both their own histories and those of others. Yet as multiple students point out, their public function is constrained by not only the cultural imbalances of colonialism but related exclusionary economic factors. Without adequate funding, outreach, and education, the impact of the returning the twenty-six objects has limits.
Collectively, the students frame a story of betrayal and reclamation that extends far beyond individual actors and the institution of museums. The dialogue Dahomey sets up between the voice of King Ghezo and the Beninois youth makes clear that what is at stake is an unfinished project of self-determination with cultural, political, economic, social, and spiritual consequences. One of the students challenges the premise of a conversation around museums, contesting their validity and reminding his peers that “we had our way of keeping things and conceiving things that we have forgotten.” If museums can be understood to be fundamentally colonial structures, then the idea of “decolonizing the museum” starts to sound suspiciously like “decolonizing colonization.”
Even if museums could be evacuated of their foundational logics, what could this accomplish without breaking the predatory financial ties that still exist between Africa and Europe? As the students articulate, neither museums nor a single event of restitution are ultimately the centrifugal force of Dahomey. What is centered is a totality of colonial history and the backstage of how a heritage is cast and recast. Breaking out of what becomes a circular debate about a landgrab of materials requires replotting into a multipronged struggle for autonomy. This is the work of Diop’s documentary, whose central lesson is that the past is not a silent, finished product but an active material for making a future not yet set in stone.