Dahomey Celebrated Looted Arts Return. What Happened Next?

Throughout the movie “Dahomey,” the eerie voice of a 19th century West African king emerges from the depths of history.

“They have named me 26,” the voice says, imagining the thoughts of King Béhanzin, who died in 1906. Onscreen, museum curators label and package a wooden sculpture of the king, preparing it to leave France and return home, to what is now Benin. “I’m torn between the fear of not being recognized by anyone,” the voice says, “and not recognizing anything.”

When 26 artworks looted by France in the 19th century traveled back to Benin in 2021, art historians hailed the return as a groundbreaking move that would pave the way for a steadier flow of repatriations.

It was the most significant repatriation to date of artworks from a former colonial power to an African country, and the French-Senegalese filmmaker Mati Diop was there to film it for “Dahomey,” her experimental documentary that won the top prize at the Berlin International Film Festival earlier this year, and which came out in U.S. movie theaters last week.

Diop’s camera traveled with the artifacts from the galleries of the Quai Branly museum in Paris to Benin’s presidential palace, where 200,000 visitors admired them over just a few months. King Béhanzin’s voice is one of a few fantastical touches she added in an otherwise nonfiction film.

“These returns open up the possibility of building new African societies,” Diop said in an interview this month. They could encourage the teaching of new narratives in schools, as well as broader historical discussions, she said.

In the movie, visitors knelt, cried and whispered in front of the returned treasures, including wooden sculptures, royal thrones and other sacred objects known as “assens” and still revered to this day. “Dahomey” depicts these moments with a delicate mix of respect and intimacy.

But three years after the cameras stopped rolling, the artworks are once again off limits to the public in Benin.

The temporary exhibition wrapped up in 2022, and the artworks were moved to a storage room in the presidential palace. The opening of a planned museum to showcase them keeps being postponed.

This has fueled questions about the intentions of the country’s president, Patrice Talon, in bringing back the treasures.

Talon has vowed to use culture and tourism to boost economic growth in Benin, a nation of 13 million people, neighboring Nigeria, that was a French colony until it became independent in 1960, at first under the name Dahomey.

Four museums are currently under construction in the country, but the president has also muzzled political opposition and independent journalists, leaving little space for an open discussion about what should be done with the returned artifacts.

In “Dahomey,” Ms. Diop gathered some Beninese college students for a debate on the significance of the treasures’ return, and their exchanges are some of the movie’s most enlightening moments.

One student says that the return of 26 artifacts is insignificant compared to the thousands of looted pieces still kept by France. Another reminds the audience that they’re conducting the debate in French, the former colonizer’s language.

Intellectuals, art historians and others in Benin have questioned whether a Western-style museum built with funding from France’s development agency and guidance from French organizations, is really the best setting to exhibit the objects.

In interviews last week, some of those who participated in the student debates said their questions remained unanswered.

One of them, Yvon Kossou-Yovo, said he appreciated Talon’s will to build museums — an issue that three Beninese and Western officials with direct knowledge of the president’s thinking said was one of the topics he followed most closely.

Yet Kossou-Yovo, who has since graduated and is now a museum guide in Western Benin, added: “The government wants to show the world that it’s working on these issues, but does it listen to its own population?”

Another debate participant, Didier Nassègandé, who now works as a theater director, said it felt as if the artworks had been confiscated by the government. “It’s like a World Cup,” he said. “We’re invited to celebrate the return, like a victory parade for a trophy, but then few people have access to the cup.”

Beninese officials say they need time to build a museum for the treasures and hundreds of other artifacts in Abomey, the city in southern Benin that French colonial forces raided in 1892, ending the reign of King Béhanzin.

How the museum will tell the story of how the king and previous rulers of the Dahomey kingdom collaborated with Western powers for centuries in the slave trade, remains unclear.

Alain Godonou, Talon’s adviser for heritage and museums, said it would take years to hire the more than 300 art curators, museum guides, librarians and other workers needed to staff the planned museums.

Islamist insurgents in Benin also posed security challenges for the project, he said. “Some places can become targets for ill-intentioned people where there are crowds,” Godonou said, adding that the museum had been redesigned to prevent attacks by ramming truck.

Still, construction isn’t scheduled to begin until next year at the earliest, and Godonou said that a plan to temporarily exhibit the artifacts in another museum in the meantime had been dropped. He added that he inspects the treasures once a month at the presidential palace, and said they would likely be exhibited again, temporarily, in Cotonou, Benin’s largest city.

Yet even while the artifacts remain behind closed doors, the impact of their return can be felt elsewhere.

They have put Benin’s ancient and contemporary art scenes on the map of West Africa’s thriving art ecosystem. This year, for the first time, the country hosted a pavilion at the Venice Biennale, which brought some wider international recognition.

On a recent afternoon, Benjamin Déguénon a multidisciplinary artist, sat in his studio in the city of Ouidah, southern Benin, surrounded by dozens of freshly finished wooden sculptures inspired by the artworks France gave back.

Déguénon had hammered some nails into his own statues, to reflect, he said, the effect that the 1892 raid and the following decades of colonization had on the artworks and the people of Benin.

“These are wounds that the Beninese people will never forget,” Déguénon said.

At the Africa Design School in Cotonou, students are creating 3-D models of the returned treasures in augmented reality, as well as card games and mobile apps for young audiences to learn about Benin’s cultural heritage.

Explaining that history to young visitors would also be a priority for the new museum in Abomey, said Gabin Djimassè, an art historian who sits on the committee overseeing the planned displays there.

Young Beninese people were “not used to visiting museums, but we have to show them how important these objects are for their own history, so they make them part of their identity,” Djimassè said.

That reckoning won’t affect young people only, Djimassè said. “We learned with texts and guidebooks often written by the French, or with a French perspective,” Djimassè, 66, said of his generation of art historians.

“We’re rewriting our country’s history in a constant back and forth,” he added, “And that takes time.”

Flore Nobimé contributed reporting from Abomey and Cotonou.