Dahomey

Directed by Mati Diop (2024)

Review by Janice Cheddie

Dahomey, a documentary film by French director Mati Diop, won the 2024 Golden Bear for best film at the Berlin International Film Festival. Diop is the niece of the Senegalese film director Djibril Diop Mambéty, and her father is the musician Wasis Diop. Dahomey follows the French government’s return in 2021 of 26 royal treasures, from among the 7,000 items looted by French troops during an invasion of the ancient Kingdom of Dahomey in present day Benin. These artefacts include zoomorphic figures representing King Ghezo (who ruled Dahomey from 1818 to 1858) and his successors Glele and Béhanzin. The documentary is roughly structured around three sites and phases: Paris, and the awakening of Ghezo in a museum vault while awaiting restitution; Benin, and the return of the 26 artefacts to a newly constructed museum in the presidential palace with a public reception; and a debate in the University of Abomey-Calavi in Benin between students on the meaning of the restitution for the contemporary Beninese. Diop marries various documentary styles with arresting images that incorporate visual motifs drawn from speculative fiction to create a moving portrayal of cultural restitution. 

Ghezo’s disembodied, distorted voice, lamenting his 130 years of darkness and captivity, is used as the narration for Dahomey. By giving voice to the zoomorphic statue which represents him – labelled by the museum as No.26 – Diop’s cinematic imagination has transformed Ghezo into a living ancestor. Speaking in the Fon language of Benin, Ghezo’s is the first voice heard in the film, declaring that in this process of restitution he is the ‘first and most legitimate victim’ of a technocratic process of cultural diplomacy – unceremoniously sent back without any official marking of his imprisonment to a land he may not recognise and that may not recognise him. The documentary is delivered largely in French, but by giving Ghezo a voice in his native tongue Diop asks the viewer to reflect on language as a transmitter of culture with the power to self-narrate. It is the voice of Ghezo that sets the emotional register of the film, humanising the meaning of the artefacts and linking their fate to both historical and contemporary Benin and its diaspora, together with the emotional and psychic repair that needs to be activated alongside renewed cultural values and self-acceptance. Diop’s visual aesthetic has managed to deliver, to date, cinema’s most accessible visual representation on the complex issue of African restitution. 

The film’s key moment is in the museum of the presidential palace in Benin. The unpacking and checking of the French documentation by the Beninese curators, who read aloud detailed classifications of composition, state of repair and so on, is intercut with a moment between a museum technician and one of the artefacts. In an act of quiet meditation, the technician seemingly recites a prayer or a song in Fon as he respectfully gazes at the artefact. It is a captured moment that forms the central image of the film’s publicity and deftly highlights the gap between processes of objectification in western museology and continuing reverence in communities of origin. Diop’s camera also documents through a visual montage the long procession of VIPs and dignitaries officially receiving the 26 artefacts, without giving them voice. She returns us to the link between the artefacts and their place in the living heritage of Benin through her filming of the university debate, in which the students discuss, among other political and cultural issues, the link between Ghezo and the other artefacts as important elements in the ritual practices of Vodun, a living intangible cultural heritage still practiced by most Beninese. Fittingly, the film ends with Ghezo’s disembodied voice outside of the museum, enjoying the night-time streets of contemporary Benin.