In her award-winning documentary Dahomey, director Mati Diop imagines the voice of royal treasures looted from West Africa by European colonisers and only recently sent back to their homeland in present-day Benin. She tells RFI she hopes it will prompt reflection on displacement, exile and return – not just of objects, but of people.
Dahomey, released in France this week, tells the story of 26 artefacts stolen by 19th-century French troops from the former African kingdom of the same name, including a throne and sculptures representing the dynasty's warrior kings.
In 2021, the collection was returned from the Quai Branly museum in Paris to Cotonou in Benin.
Diop follows the objects on this journey, travelling with them as they are packed and flown to the presidential palace in Benin, where they are greeted by visitors eager to see their heritage on display at last.
"From the moment they were removed from the display cases in Paris to being packed in crates, right up to arriving in Cotonou, I absolutely wanted to follow everything," she told RFI. "I didn't want to miss anything from the return trip."
She describes the journey as a shared experience and "an odyssey".
By documenting it, Diop hoped to represent a "community of souls much larger than that of the works" – including "men and women deported during the slave trade, dispossessed, colonised", the contemporary diaspora, and people in Benin today.
"I found it unthinkable not to mark this moment, to immortalise it through a film," she said. "And then I wanted to interview young Beninese people on the issue, an idea which came up very soon after."
Giving voice to history
Diop, who is French-Senegalese, says she and others of African descent struggle with the collective amnesia that has long surrounded the realities of European colonialism, and the "refusal to take historical and political responsibility for a history".
She told RFI she found inspiration in Aimé Césaire's Discourse on Colonialism, published in French in 1955, a critique of the brutality of colonisation and its devastating impact.
The way she found to confront historical suffering in Dahomey was to give the looted objects a voice.
Diop asked Haitian author Makenzy Orcel to write a poetic text in which the treasures reflect on their long exile, which one of the statues recites in a haunting voice-over in the Fon language.
"It's a text that really gave me a lot of strength," she told RFI's cinema programme. "I felt that I needed to speak through the power of these words, and that's exactly the starting point of the film."
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Restitution as justice
The project was born in 2017, Diop says, when "all of a sudden" French President Emmanuel Macron gave a speech in Burkina Faso urging European institutions to make significant returns of cultural heritage to the African continent within five years.
While French politicians had been slow to talk about restitution, Diop points out that activists, academics and political figures in African countries had been raising the question for decades.
"The subject of restitution is a movement, a gesture, and it is symbolically very loaded," she said.
Though the 26 artefacts Diop followed were returned to Benin, more than 7,000 works still remain in Paris, and other African countries colonised by France and fellow former empires are still waiting.
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Diop hopes that the example of the Dahomey treasures will re-engage the conversation.
Her documentary won the prestigious Golden Bear award at the 74th Berlin International Film Festival in February.
Diop said then that the prize not only honoured her, but "the entire visible and invisible community that the film represents".
She added: "To rebuild we must first restitute, and what does restitution mean? To restitute is to do justice."
