“We all bear the same scars,” a wooden statue known as Artefact 26 says in Mati Diop’s disarming documentary Dahomey. “Uprooted. Ripped out. The spoils of massive plundering.”
Giving the artefact a voice — pitch-shifted in tone and given to speaking a poetic register — is the key imaginative leap in the film, which covers 26 objects that Paris’ Quai Branly Museum returned to their homeland of Benin, formerly the kingdom of Dahomey, in 2021.
French forces had originally looted the items — known here as the Treasures — in 1892 and had displayed them for many years. After lengthy debate and a growing swell of support to repatriate the items, in 2018, then President Emmanuel Macron commissioned a report on their possible restitution. The report recommended returning all looted items to their owners and creators upon request.
The 26 treasures followed in Dahomey, of course, are just the tip of the iceberg. Beyond headline-grabbing examples like the Elgin Marbles and the Rosetta Stone, there are vast troves of religious objects, art, jewellery, toys and sculptures stored or warehoused in Western museums. The report commissioned by Macron found that up to 90 per cent of Sub-Saharan Africa’s cultural artefacts were in collections outside the continent. The trade in cultural objects is underground but massive, estimated to generate billions of dollars annually.
Recently, one often-raised argument for keeping the looted items — that galleries and museums have the resources to care for them properly — has lost credibility; in 2023 the British Museum admitted that more than 1,500 items from its collections were lost, stolen or damaged.
The impact of this looting is profound and reverberates far beyond the original theft. Having looted items stranded in foreign museums can play into colonialist narratives, suggesting the home countries can’t be trusted to look after their own creations. Without key artefacts to display and interpret, it’s all the more difficult for people to tell their own story and ascribe their own meanings to their cultural heritage.
Yet Dahomey is focused on the granular rather than this broader context. It tracks the items as they’re carefully packed up and placed into storage containers, at one point even adopting the perspective of one treasure falling into darkness as its cargo box is sealed shut.
In languid sequences, sometimes accompanied by Wally Badarou and Dean Blunt’s evocative score but untouched by narration, teams of staff load the items on the plane home. On their arrival in Benin, local press converges to photograph them and a procession of trucks with police escorts transport them to a museum. People line the streets to glimpse their return, dancing and chanting.
'In asking us to draw our own conclusions and never pretending to be the last word on cultural looting, Mati Diop has created a formally daring documentary destined to linger in the head and heart far beyond its slim 68-minute running time.'
Yet this isn’t a simple narrative of a historic wrong remedied. With the treasures back in Benin, an air of disquiet still lingers. “Everything is so strange,” Artefact 26 says. “Far removed from the country I saw in my dreams, my head is spinning.”
The film also includes scenes from a fascinating and spirited open forum where students at the University of Abomey-Calavi weigh in on the repatriation of the treasures. The gesture moves some, while others see it as tokenism or a PR stunt, especially considering that some 7,000 other antiquities from Dahomey are still in foreign collections. One speaker laments that he grew up on Disney films like Avatar rather than Beninese culture. Another participant rues that Beninese children learn in French rather than any of the nation’s Indigenous languages.
Dahomey is elevated by Joséphine Drouin-Viallard’s fluid cinematography, teasing out all the fine details of the artefacts and the shadowy contours of their journey. The key artistic decision, however, is the unexpected but artistically successful device of making a statue the film’s quasi-narrator. This choice goes far beyond mere novelty; it radically foregrounds the artefacts themselves, asking us to consider their perspective rather than that of a museum curator or visitor. The device also makes the point that the objects are, in a sense, living rather than static. Their story continues to be fleshed out, updated and contested.
Dahomey may frustrate some viewers with its stillness and aversion to didacticism, but it’s better viewed as a terrific stimulus for further thought and reading on the vast and unsettling topic — recent essays in The New Republic and The Atlantic are good places to start. In asking us to draw our own conclusions and never pretending to be the last word on cultural looting, Mati Diop has created a formally daring documentary destined to linger in the head and heart far beyond its slim 68-minute running time. As Artefact 26 suggests, this is a story without an end in sight: “Within me resonates infinity,” it says. “I won’t ever stop”.
Daniel Herborn is a journalist and novelist based in Sydney. His writing has appeared in The Saturday Paper, The Monthly, The Guardian, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, and others.