The first major return of looted treasures from Europe to Africa in the 21st century has left a lingering feeling of humiliation because of the lack of follow-up action, a French-Senegalese film-maker who accompanied a hoard of artefacts on their journey from Paris to their country of origin has said.
In her film Dahomey, which premiered at the Berlin film festival on Sunday, the director, Mati Diop, documents the 2021 journey of 26 treasures that the commander of French forces in Senegal looted from the royal palace of the kingdom of Dahomey, part of modern-day Benin, in 1890.
The return of the items from the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris, the first act of restitution by a former colonial power in Africa, had been announced three years earlier by the French president, Emmanuel Macron, triggering a Europe-wide movement of governments investigating their national collections and in some cases taking concrete steps to return parts of them.
Diop’s film not only records the joyous celebrations marking the objects’ arrival in Benin’s economic capital of Cotonou, but also shows young people debating the moment’s significance, given that thousands more artefacts remain in European collections. “Restituting 26 works out of 7,000 is an insult,” one student says.
Diop told a press conference after the film’s premiere: “These 26 works are good, but it’s not enough. It’s quite clear that there were way too few compared with the 7,000 works held captive in these museums, and I certainly think that it is humiliating.”
Musée du Quai Branly, France’s largest ethnological museum, holds 3,157 other objects from Benin in its collection. More are believed to reside in smaller museums and private collections.
The artefacts already returned, which include a towering wooden throne and lifesize zoomorphic statues, were paraded from Cotonou airport to the presidency in trucks bearing large photographs of the objects.
“We need to think about how this process was staged,” Diop said. “There’s a political agenda certainly, but also there are other ways to respond, with artists, filmmakers, students.”
The filmmaker, whose 2019 feature debut Atlantics won the Grand Prix at Cannes and was distributed by Netflix, said she had originally conceived of Dahomey as a fiction film because she didn’t believe the physical transfer of the treasures would happen so soon.
“I thought it was going to be in 20, 30 years. I didn’t know if I was going to witness this in my lifetime, so I decided to write a fiction film,” she said.
Moves to restitute further colonial-era objects to Benin have stalled in recent months because a law enabling their return is being held up in the French parliament.
Bénédicte Savoy, a French historian who co-authored the 2018 report that led to Macron’s announcement, said their eventual return was nonetheless a question of when rather than if. “It will come; that’s certain,” she said. “It’s the march of history and nothing can stop it.
“Things will continue, regardless of Emmanuel Macron or the French government’s domestic policy considerations.” Diop’s film “shows how a society that reconnects with its heritage gains in strength and future”.
The film shows how the arrival of the Dahomey treasures sparked a wider debate about Benin’s national identity. “Many people had no idea these works were pillaged,” said Habib Ahandessi, who appears in the film, at the press conference in Berlin. “And when their return was announced, it kickstarted a debate.”
“We had been taught our ancestors were frivolous,” he said. “And then we learned our ancestors were real geniuses, their artworks were fantastic.”
