Dahomey

French-Senegalese director Mati Diop returns with a documentary following the journey of priceless treasures that were stolen by the French empire and are now being returned to their African homeland

Film Review by Rory Doherty | 21 Oct 2024
  • Dahomey
Film title: Dahomey
Director: Mati Diop
Starring: Makenzy Orcel (voice)
Release date: 25 Oct
Certificate: PG

Over a century ago, the French army looted priceless treasures and statues from the West African kingdom of Dahomey. It wasn't an isolated pillage, nor was it the most severe act of violence committed by French colonial forces, and everything that the French did was also being carried out just as brutally by European settlers and colonists across the whole of Africa and around the world. The current French government, led by Emmanuel Macron, has pledged to return looted African treasures from their prestigious museums, but the sheer enormity and brutality of colonial oppression threatens to undermine the 26 Dahomey statues and artefacts making the much-politicised journey back to modern-day Benin – is this the extent of reparations that colonial powers like France are willing to make? 

Dahomey, the second film by Mati Diop, who won the Grand Prix at Cannes 2019 for her debut Atlantics, documents the packaging, delivery and reception of the 26 treasures returning to Benin. Diop is interested in unravelling the metaphysical and philosophical impact of these statues returning to West Africa – but also in interrogating the easy, comforting messages about decolonisation surrounding their return. The kingdom from which these statues were looted no longer exists, but the colonial and capitalist injustices of the past 130 years have affected modern-day Benin just as much, if not more, than the century-old theft of cultural and religious artefacts.

Diop’s camera lingers on the ways these artefacts are handled – including one poignant moment of a gloved hand cradling the immobile hand of a statue – before being measured and boxed up for a triumphant homecoming that, as is pointed out by critical Beninese voices, is less a victory over a former oppressor and more a mutually beneficial deal made with them.

Upon the artefacts' arrival, Benin scholars and experts dutifully categorise the history and condition of each object. Whenever you think you’re settling into a purely observant, meticulous documentary about process meshing with historical trauma, Diop pivots into sudden, distorted voiceover from the perspective of the artefacts, who poetically speak about their years in exile, desires to come home and how liberation can come hand-in-hand with disorientation. It’s a welcome, pleasingly subjective choice, but in a documentary this short (running at only 68 minutes) and cleanly divided into linear sections, at times it threatens to disrupt the flow of information and insight.

The voiceover works most strongly in Dahomey’s final act, in an extended montage of a debate between Beninese students. The incisive perspectives on growing up in a former colonial state combine with the dreamlike point-of-view of the royal statues to create an urgent chorus of contradictory, fiercely felt voices that celebrate and interrogate the messaging around the statues' return. 

A proportion of stolen treasures are now out of the historic oppressor’s hands, yes, but how happy should Benin and other former colonial states be about the symbolic nature of their return? Dahomey does not land on a concrete answer, but by centralising real and imagined voices in nearly every scene, it also underlines how we should never be satisfied with decolonisation on anyone but the colonised people's terms.


Released 25 Oct by MUBI; certificate PG