Dahomey

In a move reminiscent of the opening pages of Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad’s 1899 novella that has become a symbol for the inherent blind spots of European anti-imperialist art – Dahomey’s journey begins on the shores of a river winding its way through a colonial capital. In Conrad, it was the Thames, London’s connection to the British Empire lying beyond the horizon, that prompted the book’s narrator to ponder the great city’s past as a Roman outpost and its present as the point of departure for many a doomed colonial adventure.
In this Golden Bear-winning docufiction by Atlantique (2019) director Mati Diop, the river in question is the Seine, traversing the capital of a country that – with its numerous overseas dependencies – is one of the last enduring imperial states; and much like Heart of Darkness, Dahomey uses its potamic opening gestures to reflect on the inexorable flow of history and the traces it has left on the city and the empire in which it begins.

A series of shots of Paris by night – a street peddler’s gaudily blinking Eiffel Tower replicas, a pleasure barge chugging languidly along the river’s dark waters – eventually leads Diop and DP Joséphine Drouin-Viallard to the Seine-side Musée du Quai Branly-Jacques Chirac. Established only in 2006, the museum has already gained some national notoriety for housing tens of thousands of ethnographic objects, many of which were looted by France’s imperial armies over several centuries’ worth of colonial expansion and subjugation.
It is here, in the museum’s darkest corner, that the film’s first words are spoken. A hoarse, ghostly whisper, performed by Haitian author Makenzy Orcel, declares not in French but in the West African Fon language: «As far back as I can remember, there was no night as profound and impenetrable as this one. Here, it’s the only possible reality.» It is the voice of “the 26”: twenty-six artifacts, a mere fraction of the many thousands plundered by the French during their invasion of the African Kingdom of Dahomey in 1892, that were returned in 2021 from the Musée du Quai Branly to their place of origin by the French government.

This then is the project of Diop’s Dahomey – to bear witness to the lifting of this colonial veil, this one-hundred-and-thirty-year-long night, and to capture the historic restitution of the stolen Dahomean art to the old royal city of Abomey in present-day Benin. However, in spite of this unambiguously positive development, this is not a triumphant film, nor is it one to mistake restitution for reparation. On the contrary, what makes Dahomey the invigorating piece of political filmmaking that it is, is precisely its refusal to settle on a definitive narrative about “the 26”, to be content with any interpretation of what their return means politically, economically, socially, or historically, or to take for granted any of the edifying – or more pessimistic – stories one might graft onto their widely mediatised homecoming.
Much of that becomes clear in Makenzy Orcel’s early voiceover narration: in his and Diop’s telling, the 26 are “uprooted” witnesses to the now-destroyed Kingdom of Dahomey, chosen by the descendants of their colonial captors as France’s “best and most legitimate sacrifice” to the need of saving face on the geopolitical stage.

Indeed, these ambivalent feelings are echoed later on in the film, when Diop and Drouin-Viallard sit in – Frederick Wiseman-style – on an animated, deeply principled long-form debate between students of the University of Abomey-Calavi, revolving around the significance of the return of the 26. Some argue that the return of Beninese cultural heritage is cause for celebration, with its storing in a Beninese museum signifying an important step towards freeing African archaeology from the lingering paternalistic influence of European cultural institutions. Others ask why one should celebrate the return of 26 objects, when there are thousands more locked away in French museum archives. Others still point out the political expediency at play: to Emmanuel Macron’s government, this act of restitution is as much of a PR victory as it is to Benin’s president Patrice Talon, who is roundly criticised for his failure to successfully address more pressing domestic issues like poverty and hunger.
This debate, the wholly engrossing centrepiece of Dahomey’s second half, is just the most explicit instance of Diop pulling on the dangling discursive threads uncovered by the return of the 26. Time and again, she and editor Gabriel Gonzalez cannily steer the viewer’s attention in the direction of seemingly insignificant yet highly evocative details: a Beninese waiter hurrying around the periphery of a state function, a museum worker describing the slaves of Dahomey’s iconic King Ghezo depicted on one of the artifacts, a woman reflecting on what the restitution means to her as a citizen of Haiti, a group of Beninese workers carrying a crate whilst being unhelpfully tapped on the shoulders by a white museum official.

In doing so, Dahomey is not merely a film about what to make of this particular example of restitution but also one about the impossibly diffuse legacy of colonialism writ large. Thorny questions are raised about Dahomey being at once a nationalist myth, a source of a pan-African sense of belonging, and a historical kingdom with its own history of expansionism and enslavement; about Benin as a republic in the European mould replicating European class structures; and about the fact that four hundred years of colonial exploitation cannot possibly be undone by just sixty years of decolonising efforts against the often violent resistance or malign indifference of the old imperial powers.

As a work of politically rigorous documentary, Dahomey is nothing short of an extraordinary achievement. Armed with a lucid aesthetic concept, Diop presents a compelling, deliberately contradictory, and emphatically irresolvable discourse on history, its maddening yet inevitable refusal to tell a single authoritative story, and the attempts – made either in good faith or not – by cultural institutions, political entities, and other interested parties to resist those inconvenient truths. Dahomey is essential cinema, especially in an era of a rising anti-decolonisation backlash.