‘Dahomey’ Review: Mati Diop’s Exquisitely Strange Documentary Meditation on the Return of Looted Artifacts to Benin
variety.comJessica Kiang In November 2021, 61 years after Benin gained independence from the French empire, 26 of the many thousands of plundered national antiquities were returned by France to their African home.
Inserting an inquisitive, imaginative intelligence into this key moment in the troubled timeline of post-imperial cultural politics, French-Senegalese director Mati Diop fashions her superb, short but potent hybrid doc “Dahomey” as a slim lever that cracks open the sealed crate of colonial history, sending a hundred of its associated erasures and injustices tumbling into the light.
The film takes its title from the kingdom on Benin’s Atlantic coast, that existed in formidable militarism for 300 years until 1894, and whose fabled female warriors were recently the subject of Gina Prince-Bythewood’s “The Woman King.” But “Dahomey” starts far from the pomp and grandeur of that wealthy, warlike kingdom, in the basement level of the Parisian Musée du Quai Branly, where CCTV cameras stare down at empty, bare-walled, windowless corridors.
This is where several of the artifacts, including a wooden statue of King Gezo, who ruled Dahomey in the mid-1800s and whose pose looks irresistibly like he’s giving a Black Power salute, are being packed up ready for transportation.
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