Looking back at the 19th century, when European powers rampaged across Africa and cut apart kingdoms to plunder resources and kidnap millions for the slave trade, it would be understandable to argue that stolen artifacts were not top of mind for those being colonized. To its credit, Mati Diop’s lovely yet fractious documentary Dahomey does not try to make that argument. What she does attempt is a deeper story about the loss that lingers from colonial conquest and the uncertainty about how to move forward.
The film’s title comes from the kingdom that was a dominant power in West Africa for centuries until 1892 when French troops captured the capital city of Abomey. Royal artifacts were looted and shipped to France for museum display. Dahomey‘s story begins in 2021 when decades of efforts for repatriation resulted in 26 of those objects being shipped back to Benin, the sliver of a nation between Togo and Nigeria that sits on old Dahomey territory.
Mati Diop immediately leans into her boldest choice. Instead of just focusing on one of the key pieces, a statue of Dahomey’s King Ghezo in a fighting stance, she has it function as the film’s narrator. In a deeply booming tone, the statue—voiced by award-winning author Makenzy Orcel, who also co-wrote the film with Diop—muses on its long exile (“so dark in this foreign place”) and uncertain future (“everything is so strange”). The tones are rich with the combative declarations one would imagine of a warrior king who ruled an expansionist kingdom with its own history of enslavement.
The voiced “thoughts” curling out of the dark also resonate with the anxiety of a prisoner about to be released from a lengthy incarceration. As a narrative device, this will be divisive for audiences, some of whom will see it as distancing and even unintentionally comic. However, it’s a deft move by Diop, humanizing and giving a literal voice to the past in ways that no amount of primary research could provide.
Mati Diop’s approach to the actual transfer of the artifacts dispels any potential for campiness that some might see in the narration. Seeming to channel director Frederick Wiseman’s hanging-back style, she captures the workaday details of these grandly mythic pieces being carefully packed for transport. She uses one lyrical flourish here, placing a camera inside the Ghezo statue’s crate so that the closing of the lid and the sound of drills turning screws to seal it shut provides an unnerving sensation of being buried alive.
In Benin, Mati Diop captures scenes of celebration when the trucks approach the museum where they will be displayed—dancers in coordinated outfits, construction workers, and passersby eagerly rubbernecking. Instead of presenting this as an unadulterated moment of triumph, the colonized reclaiming property and a scrap of dignity from the colonizers, Diop pivots almost immediately to an argument.
Without preamble, we are presented with a roomful of young people taking turns at a microphone and speaking about the artworks’ repatriation. They deliver a range of takes on the moment’s meaning, from the occasion being an early step towards reparations to an emotional reconnection with a previously lost past or a cynical ploy by a government that cares more for symbolic gestures than taking care of the Benin people today. While the scene is not quite organic—Diop set it up with the University of Abomey-Calavi—it still serves as a good pocket vox populi. The attendees’ loosely flowing arguments and polemics initially seem off-topic, but they illustrate what an open wound the artworks’ looting left behind.
Mati Diop’s centering of that gathering’s contentious spirit serves as its own kind of thesis. She shows, with again a quiet Wiseman-like reserve, people walking reverentially among the artworks and staring in captivated awe. A man wonders why, as a child, he only encountered Western culture and learned nothing about his history. At the same time, we hear the audience at the student gathering openly laugh at a woman who says seeing the artwork made her cry. None of these viewpoints are given more weight than the other. Doing so might imply that there is a conclusion to this story.
What is certain is that the world the artworks were stolen from no longer exists in many ways. The film does not seem to suggest this means the repatriation does not matter, but Dahomey does feel like a story that is more about the present and the future of Africa than its past. Near the end, amidst buzzy street life scenes that recall the light magic realism of Mati Diop’s 2019 film Atlantics, the narration declares, “I am the metamorphosis.” Change is the only constant.