The AKADi Magazine team kicked off the 11th edition of the Film Africa film festival with the screening of Dahomey, a film by French-Senegalese filmmaker Mati Diop. Abena Sεwaa went along to the opening night to watch the film and shares her verdict.
The Film Africa screening of the award-winning film Dahomey couldn't have been timelier.
The film was screened on Friday 25 October, the same day that Commonwealth heads of government convened their biennial conference. During the two-day event, heads of state renewed calls for the UK to apologise and make reparations for its historic role in the forced trafficking of enslaved Africans.
Meanwhile on 27 October, the UK’s All-Party Parliamentary Group on Afrikan Reparations (APPG-AR) held its second Reparations Conference in London, discussing pathways for activists to push forward policy solutions on reparations at local, national, and international levels.
Amid this climate of discussion, it was especially fitting for Film Africa to open its 11th UK festival celebrating African films at the BFI in London with Dahomey.
Directed and co-written by Mati Diop, Dahomey represents a daring piece of speculative documentary-making that takes real-life footage showcasing the return of 26 royal treasures from Musée du quai Branly in Paris, France to the Benin president's palace in Cotonou.
The returned royal treasures included a wooden statue of King Ghezo, ruler of Dahomey (now Benin) from 1818 to 1858. There is also a lion-headed sculpture of his successor King Glele, and a statue of King Behanzin, Glele’s heir, who is portrayed in wood as half-man, half-shark.
I visited the Musée du quai Branly in 2015, and recall being amazed at the volumes of artefacts, non-indigenous to France, that were housed in the building. They included an exquisite collection of Asante goldweights, which I had to take a picture of despite the disapproving looks of a security guard there.
I remember a transparent column, stacked high with musical instruments from across the globe, that cut through each of the floors of the museum. The column resembled a chaotic display of items rather than a respectful preservation of world cultures.
It always struck me as odd how these items seemed to be displayed in a way that was less about their intrinsic value but more about how many units of other people's items this museum had amassed. According to the museum’s website, it holds over 370,000 objects, 700,000 iconographic pieces, and 200,000 reference works.
Knowing that France returned only 26 of Benin’s treasures while still retaining 7,000 felt unfair and an injustice that is explored in the film.
Dahomey is, at its core, a film of stark contrasts. The film opens in Paris - the home of the Eiffel Tower, which in itself is a tourist attraction that many of us are aware was funded by Haiti after the nation dared to resist the enslavement of its people. In 1825, France forced Haiti to pay 150 million francs, to compensate French slaveowners for lost property and income after the Haitian Revolution.
The opening scenes of Dahomey draw the audience's attention to the small replica Eiffel Tower souvenirs - mass-produced, cheap and accessible. Meanwhile, the priceless royal treasures looted from the Dahomey kingdom, and hidden from public view for 170 years, were only repatriated to their rightful owners in November 2021.
It is deeply ironic that while Western legislation often makes the return of African artefacts to their homelands an arduous and lengthy task, the same can be said about the legislative hurdles Africans have to make to enter countries in the West.
If, as has been widely reported, 90-95% of Africa's artefacts reside outside the continent, how could Africans get an equitable opportunity to access these symbols of their identity?
Keith Shiri, lead curator at Film Africa, emphasised this point shortly before the start of the screening, when he said: “If you want to know about the Kente cloth, you don’t go to Ghana, you come here [the West] because they have collected so much.”
Through Dahomey, viewers experience the return of these artefacts to Benin. Mati brings the wooden statue of King Ghezo to life, immersing the audience in his perspective. When he’s wrapped and packed in a crate, ready for travel, and plunged into darkness, we share those moments of isolation. The screen goes black, the sound mutes, heightening the uncertainty of what might happen next.
All this is amplified by King Ghezo's monologue, which is penned by Haitian poet Makenzy Orcel and spoken in Fon, the King’s mother tongue.
One poignant scene in the film reveals King Ghezo’s anxiety about returning home. He tussles with the uncertainty over whether he will be recognised, and whether he will belong - a feeling I know is echoed by Africans that have spent years away from their mother country.
Mati taps into Africa's rich oral storytelling tradition, challenging Eurocentric cinematic methods by uniquely combining a documentary style that employs folklore, and fantasy. It is then unsurprising that the film has been lauded with awards, and thatToronto Film Festival described Dahomey as “the most formally experimental film”.
Throughout the film, contrasts appear. Mati juxtaposes the sterile, neutral environment of Musée du quai Branly's basement where the statues were stored, against the lively, colourful and excited scenes as the people of Benin witness the return of their ancestral treasures.
A favourite scene, for me, was when two tradesmen, who had been tasked with painting the presidential palace where the treasures would be displayed, sneaked a look at the statues.
Their awe-struck faces matched those of the visitors, young and old, that would later visit the palace and cemented in my mind, the importance for Africans to see their own greatness reflected in their past works.
It is likely to be the first time many of those visitors saw the craftmanship, and ingenuity of people long gone that are inextricably linked to their identities, cultures and histories.
Views like these formed part of spirited discussions from students at the University of Abomey-Calavi in Cotonou that were documented in the film. Some students were vocal in celebrating the return, while others felt 26 artefacts was a paltry amount to return when so much more lay in Western institutions. How many years would it take for Benin to receive the rest, and whose lifetime would that happen in, one student asked.
Seeing how engaged the students were in discussing the pros and cons of these treasures returning made me wonder if Ghana ever considered having its own discussions following the recent return of Royal Asante regalia from the UK and USA.
What was crystal clear throughout Dahomey was that this film was not the end but the beginning. Once the credits rolled, I had already turned to my neighbour to garner his impressions of the film and these conversations spilled outside the auditorium and included other audience members.
The discussion on reparations may have been supressed for generations but the battle to return these items is not going away. Films like Dahomey create a vital space for these dialogues to resonate. The film adds to existing work already galvanised elsewhere to secure the return of looted items, and ancestral remains, and force changes to existing legislation that currently protects the West from returning some of these stolen goods.
This article is an original piece written by Abena Sεwaa of AKADi Magazine and cannot be reproduced without permission.
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