Dahomey’ film invites colonial past to speak through Benin’s stolen treasures 

By:Melissa Chemam with RFI 

Dahomey, released in France this week, tells the story of 26 artifacts 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.