By JOÃO LANARI BO*
Commentary on the documentary directed by Mati Diop
The restitution of works of art from colonized peoples is a subject that insists on returning, a discomfort that wanders through Western museums, especially in Europe and the United States, as a sign of fracture – historical and civilizational. The subject is also a sign of the colonialist violence that has inhabited the planet in recent centuries, and continues to inhabit it, disguised in new forms and strategies. For Dahomey, the documentary that the Franco-Senegalese filmmaker Mati Diop completed in 2024, undermines the perceptions that gather around this discomfort, proposing itself, in a way, as a discomfort of discomfort.
In November 2021, 61 years after Benin gained independence from the French Empire, 26 of the thousands of looted national antiquities were returned by France to their African home: 26 out of 7, to be precise, as the film reports. It was a gesture supposedly altruistic and magnanimous of President Emmanuel Macron.
Dahomey begins with aseptic and slow sequences of the removal of these statues, which inhabited the Quai Branly Museum, dedicated to the “early arts” – an ambitious project executed by Jacques Chirac and designed by the architect Jean Nouvel, inaugurated on June 20, 2006. It has 40.600 m², a collection of 300.000 works, of which 3.500 are on display.
It is no small feat: years and years of relentless colonialism that the French – the French, the cradle of the Enlightenment – engaged in without respite, and which survives today, spread across small possessions around the world, almost like a caricature. France's largest border (French Guiana), Alas, is with Brazil. It is not known how many of these 300 thousand artifacts are the result of looting.
Shortly before the inauguration of Branly, the newspaper Le Monde revealed that many of the pieces were stolen in Nigeria and bought on the black market. This did not shake Jacques Chirac, who was ecstatic about the work (French rulers value being remembered for landmarks cultural).
The film's first narration is a somber dubbing in the Fon language of King Gezo (or Guézo), who ruled Dahomey from 1818 to 1859. Outraged and perplexed by the label of “26”, he laments the long night of captivity in the caves of the civilized world – and allows himself to be lulled, surrounded by museum care, for his return to his homeland. Guezô is known for the wealth he accumulated by trading in the slaves he captured.
Two royal leaders join Guezô on the journey, both his descendants: Glelê, king of 1858 and 1889, sculpted with a lion's head, and Beanzim, who led the resistance against the French invasion of 1892 – represented as half man, half shark.
The aesthetic ecstasy that Jacques Chirac and millions of visitors experience when contemplating the statutory “first” probably has little or nothing to do with the meaning of the pieces in their origin. One way to situate this shift would be to think of the subject-spectator of museums as anchored in a kind of popular metaphysics prevalent in the West, as suggested by anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro – a metaphysics that sees all “other” knowledge as a precarious version of itself.
This is “perspectivism,” according to which “according to different ethnic groups, pigs, for example, saw each other as people. And they saw humans, their predators, as jaguars. The jaguars, in turn, saw themselves and other jaguars as people. For them, however, the Indians were tapirs or peccaries – they were prey. This logic was not restricted to animals. It applied to spirits, who saw humans as prey, and also to gods and the dead.”
Dahomey, from this perspective, would be a “perspectivist” documentary: the statues see each other as humans, and see humans as predators. The journey back, against the flow of the original plunderings, of the slaves exiled from Africa, of the emigrants seeking work in industrialized countries – is a journey that is organized around this now decentered world, without the subject of organizing knowledge of the gaze that we are accustomed to seeing in documentaries.
Mati Diop doesn’t spare anyone from the upheaval he documents: or rather, Guezô and his companions don’t spare anyone. The reception of the statues in Benin, from the celebrations in the streets to the coldness of their display in the palace – everything contributes to leaving the statues even more perplexing. A student assembly at the University of Abomey-Calavi, the country’s main West African university, is the final third of Dahomey: contradictions, cultural heritage, saturation of arguments – history, after all, is the “present under construction”, notes Guezô.
“The colonizers stole our soul,” said one of those present.
*João Lanari Bo He is a professor of cinema at the Faculty of Communication at the University of Brasília (UnB). Author, among other books, of Cinema for Russians, Cinema for Soviets (Time Bazaar) [https://amzn.to/45rHa9F]
Reference
Dahomey
France, 2024, Documentary, 67 minutes.
Directed by: Mati Diop
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