Dahomey review - return of the king

Mati Diop’s “speculative documentary” reverses the transatlantic journey of her feature debut Atlantics’ ghost Senegalese migrants, as plundered Beninese artefacts are returned from France. Dahomey is about African displacement and despoilment, and Diop chooses to give these ancient, ritually charged statues of men and beasts the sonorous voice of some alien god found floating in an sf space-capsule, an Afrofuturist deity speaking across centuries.

The Kingdom of Dahomey’s fierce war against French colonisation was lost in 1892, when thousands of treasures were looted and shipped back to Paris. It’ss part of modern Benin, where Macron unexpectedly authorised the repatriation of a symbolic 26 objects in 2021. Already envisioning a film about such a moment decades in the future, Diop’s cameras were ready.

Dahomey starts in the sterile silence of Paris’s Quai Branly Museum, where the returnees are bound and chained for passage in coffin-like cases. The chilly, precise backroom preparation perhaps unfairly contrasts with their later, lively Beninese exhibition, but depicts a living death for objects Diop has imbued with flesh and blood resonance. Two black workers discussing a statue are imperiously shooed away by a shadowy official.

The film bursts into hot life in Benin’s capital Cotonou, where Diop selected fiercely informed students for a freewheeling, fiery intellectual debate. “What was looted more than a century ago was our soul, our ability to be proud,” one woman says, as the objects are placed among wider colonial thefts, of the Fon language for French, for instance. It’s very hard by the end to justify such treasures’ wholesale European retention when, like the cosmic English visions of Turner or Blake, they embody invaluable national roots.

Dahomey’s palaces, prosperity and regal art were, though, as in Europe, partly built on the slave trade, with the ocean, as in Atlantics, a passage of death. “Atlantic, shores of the wound,” her statue’s voiceover sighs, as a spectral youth pads down a beach in the hazy night. As Diop said after a London Film Festival Dahomey screening, reflecting on both her features, “the circulation of black bodies and arts is very troubling”.

Diop’s richly humane camera anyway roams Cotonou like a statue’s wandering spirit, catching the neon night, casual moped currents and bustling modernity. Usually filmed with opaque otherness by Westerners, Africans are seen from the unexceptional, particular inside by her Franco-Senegalese eye, cinematic soul as precious as any carving’s return.

Diop is from a family of Senegalese artists, including her late uncle Djibril Diop Mambety, director of Easy Rider-esque African cult hit Touki Bouki (1973), and musician dad Wasis Diop, whose move to Paris created her own duel roots. “I would have been eaten by Senegal – by those things that prevent me from opening my mind,” Wasis once told me, reflecting on staying away from Dakar. “Paris isn’t really my home, though. I am like a piece of Senegalese wood, just travelling.” His daughter’s new film finds new life in those endless currents.

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