by Abiba Coulibaly
The first words uttered in Mati Diop’s Dahomey (2024) conjure the night; over a pitch-black screen, a guttural, unearthly voice speaking Fon states, “As far back as I can go, there has never been a night so deep and opaque.” The night in question is one of anticipation, the excitement before travel, specifically, a long-awaited journey of return. Dahomey’s premise is as follows:
“November 9, 2021.
26 royal treasures from the kingdom of Dahomey are due to leave Paris, returning to their land of origin, the present-day republic of Benin.
These artefacts were among the thousands looted by French colonial troops during the invasion in 1892.
For them, 130 years of captivity are coming to an end.”
The 26 sacred and ceremonial artefacts in question comprise royal stools, ancestral portals, and, most strikingly, lifesize statues serving as bocios—literally translated as “empowered cadavers”—vodun sculptures through which living and ancestral beings can be manipulated. It is the voice of one of these, an imposing anthropomorphic bocio over 2-metres tall and cast in iron, who provides our portal to the spirit world and insight into the transportation and transformation about to take place. Attributed the perfunctory label “26” by museum administration, in actuality the anguished voice that intermittently narrates the film (voiced by Haitian writer Makenzy Orcel), is that of the spirit of King Ghezo, the influential ruler of the Kingdom of Dahomey from 1818 to 1858.
In seminal essay film Les statues meurent aussi (a joint work from 1953 between Chris Marker, Alain Resnais and Ghislain Cloquet, commissioned by the publisher Présence Africaine and banned for a decade upon release), likely the first filmic interrogation of African artefacts institutionalised in the West, the narrator states: “And these statues are mute. They have mouths and don’t speak. They have eyes and don’t see us.” In Diop’s film, however, they are far from mute or unseeing. Subject to spectacle and scrutiny by day, it is clear they have been looking back at their observers, and at night they enter into communion with much to say about the world of their human captors, proffering a sobering tale of transplantation and dislocation. As much as Diop’s film is about the daytime happenings of the mortal world–reactions of the general public, the hierarchical labour choreographies that play out in cultural institutions, and lively political and academic debate, she also contemplates what happens when the harsh floodlights dim, exploring the nocturnal museum space, emptied of ogling spectators and flooded with the animate charge and suppressed wrath of history.
When 26 continues his opening monologue: “It was so dark in this foreign place that I lost myself in my dreams, becoming one with these walls”, it is clear that their display cases, posited as honorific, are equally carceral. The feeling of being caged in is repeated during his journey of Transatlantic transit from Quai Branly in Paris to the Palais de la Marina in Cotonou; at some points in the film the audience assumes the perspective of the artefacts themselves, such as when, awaiting transfer, a sepulchral covering is placed overhead and then drilled shut, enveloping the viewer in a transportative darkness, evoking the Middle Passage. In Benin, between cargo casing and the final resting place of glass exhibition cabinets that await them, the figures are temporarily unbound, exposed to fresh air and released from their climate-controlled containers. When we see them placed in new display cases in Benin, it feels, in some ways like a reconfinement, though a fundamental shift in relational and geographic positionality has occurred.
The statues also appear ambivalent about their return home, with Diop playing with the idea that these artefacts have become diasporic. The order “You can leave now. 26, go back home!” in some ways, reframes the repatriation as a deportation, for this is, after all, a concession that has been given and not seized, a far-too familiar instance of mobility on self-serving terms set by a Western state. By some accounts, such as those of the ardent students of Abomey-Calavi University whose debates punctuate the film, the return serves as a publicity stunt for the heads of state of France and Benin. Both these notions of the alienation of the emigré and the idea that he is a pawn in a game between two elitist, predatory entities are solidified when 26 laments, “Go back home? What awaits me elsewhere?”, wary that he will “leave the kingdom of the night to enter another.” This accusatory expression of cross-continental discontent with the lacklustre politics and moral integrity of both his point of departure and destination is significant and transhistorical, given the Kingdom of Dahomey’s (and King Ghezo himself’s) role in perpetuating the Transatlantic slave trade in collaboration with the Portuguese, alluded to when he states, “My head is still assailed by the rattle of chains. I have in my mouth an aftertaste of the ocean.”
When we first encounter Benin’s turbulent, moonlit coast, 26 narrates, “Atlantic, shores of the wound. May the light engulf you.” This remorseful evocation of the Atlantic recalls Diop’s two earlier films of the same name, which also harness night and darkness to articulate the testimonies of those who have been wronged by racialised mobility regimes. Having captured a spectral, spark-ridden enactment of oral tradition in Atlantiques (2009) and vengeful (trans)migratory possession afflict the female protagonists of Atlantique (2019) after dusk, the night as an arena for necromancy in the pursuit of reckoning with racial capitalism, is solidified as a hallmark of Diop’s with Dahomey.
While Chris Marker et al’s aforementioned Les Statues meurent aussi presents a more well-known reference in the genealogy1 of non-fiction cinema to interrogate the coloniality of the museum, it is Sarah Maldoror, the French-Guadeloupean filmmaker, allied to Algeria through residence and Angola through marriage (to MPLA freedom fighter Mário Pinto de Andrade), dubbed “the Mother of African Cinema” for her status as the first woman to direct a feature film on the continent, whose film Et les chiens se taisent (1978) emerges as the most reverberant predecessor to Dahomey.2
Set in the Musée de l’homme, specifically its underbelly, the subterranean storeroom (much like the grainily surveilled, securitised ones we are led through in Dahomey) where the African spoils of looting are detained, Et les chiens se taisent also opens with the nighttime imagery: “In the beginning, there was night. Night and misery comrades. Misery and animal resignation, the night rustling with the breathing of slaves dilating under their christophoric steps and the great sea of misery.” These words, spoken by Gabriel Glissant, actor in Med Hondo’s Soleil Ô (1970) and West Indies (1979), and director of his own Union Populaire pour la Libération de la Guadeloupe-sponsored documentary, La Machette et le marteau (1975), are those of Aimé Césaire, from his 3-part play, a reimagining of the throes of the Haitian Revolution, from which Maldoror’s film borrows its name. This adaptation of Césaire’s work hints at her theatrical past; before becoming a filmmaker—a profession at which she first cut her teeth at as assistant to Gillo Pontecorvo on The Battle of Algiers (1966), no less—Maldoror, along with Timité Bassori, Ababacar Samb Makharam, Toto Bissainthe, and Robert Liensol founded Les Griots in 1956, the first Black theater company in France, which would organise performances of plays by Césaire, as well as the likes of Jean-Paul Sartre and Jean Genet.
Glissant is dressed as a museum preservationist but incarnates an insurgent Toussaint Louverture, as if materialised from the past, recounting the genesis of the rebellion. Maldoror herself also appears, equally anachronistic in the role of Louverture’s conciliatory mother, while simultaneously playing the leader of a group of children on a school trip at the museum. Maldoror’s choice to relocate this tale of dispossession from Haitian plantations to the vaults of the Musée de l’homme, France’s preeminent ethnographic-turned-anthropologic museum, speaks to their common status as haunted sites harbouring deterritorialised and immobilised entities, scenes of otherised spectacle, and a disquieting nighttime aura. The museum itself is located in the direct, far-bank line of vision of the Eiffel Tower, whose coruscating minature trinket iterations open Dahomey, alluding to the illegalised labour that touts them, and the false glittering promises of Paris. In Et les chiens se taisent Maldoror delves into the city’s less sightly vaults, and the sediments of history which accumulated its bloodmoney and paved the way for its mythic status.
As Glissant plays Louverture playing a museum worker, he details the complicit refuge offered by the night, though whether he is addressing the visiting schoolchildren or the artefacts strewn around him is unclear. Seemingly bewitched, he declares, “It was night. We crawled through the sugarcane. The cutlasses were chortling at the stars, but we didn’t care about the stars”; as with Diop’s abducted relics, the night provides a veil for collective plotting against the master.
While the Haitian landscape is ommitted, brief clips of overgrown, coastal Martinique feature. Crashing waves surge upwards, reminiscent of the opening scenes of both Maldoror’s first feature film to receive a theatrical release, the rousing Sambizanga (1972), and Battleship Potemkin (dir. Sergei Eisenstein, 1925), which would prove pivotal viewing in her trajectory, inciting her to pursue film school in Moscow. Like Diop, Maldoror ensures the ominous awe inspired by the ocean is invoked via Césaire’s words: “The great sea of black blood, the great swell of sugarcane and dividends, the great ocean of horror and desolation”, with the night and the sea seemingly twinned by both auteurs owing to their abyssal expanse.
For both Diop and Maldoror, the museum becomes a space where ethnicised history is not purely consumed but has the ability to assert, and correct perceptions of, itself. As just 26 of the 7,000 stolen Beninese artefacts—in the words of 26, “there are thousands of us in this night”—have been returned, with Benin indebting itself by €20 million to France in order to construct a museum in which to preserve returned heritage, and legislation on the restitution of cultural property indefinitely postponed in France’s National Assembly at the beginning of the year, the task at hand is both embryonic and gargantuan. However, Diop’s artefacts face a fate that those in Maldoror’s film could not dream of, and when, during one of his nocturnal confessions, 26 admits, “I did not expect to see daylight again”, we are reminded of the auroral possibilities that spring from thoughts and desires we only dare to verbalise at night.
- In a similar vein, it is also worth mentioning Ghanaian director Nii Kwate Owoo’s 1970 short You Hide Me, which turns a critical eye upon the British Museum’s collection of looted African artefacts banished to the building’s basement, and is considered the first post-independence film by a director from from Anglophone Africa
↩︎ - Coincidentally, Maldoror was a good friend of Marker and would supply (uncredited) photos of Guinea Bissau’s independence movement which illustrate his famed Sans Soleil (1983).
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Abiba Coulibaly is a film programmer with a background in critical geography, interested in exploring the intersection between ethics and aesthetics.
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