Review: An overdue, anxious and complicated homecoming
The cultural displacement haunting a tense Benin is as visceral today as ever.
Line Sidonie Talla Mafotsing
In December 2020 France passed a landmark law giving the Musée du quai Branly in Paris one year to transfer 26 artefacts back to the Republic of Benin. About a year later, 129 years after they were seized by French troops from the royal palace of King Béhanzin in Abomey, the capital of the Kingdom of Dahomey, the artefacts returned “home” to Cotonou. Blending fiction and documentary, French-Senegalese director Mati Diop’s newest work, Dahomey, follows this historic return.
Diop gives the statue of King Ghezo, labeled “No. 26”, a literal voice through which it draws the audiences into its imagined interior life. “Why didn’t they call me by my name?” he asks himself. “Don’t they know it?” Throughout the film, No. 26 questions his purpose in the world as it is now and contemplates the last 129 years away from home.
In the Beninese capital, the artefacts are welcomed with pomp and circumstance. Their return is a public relations coup for politicians in both France and Benin. It’s a “good faith” act by France, which was already losing influence in West Africa even in 2021. During a 2017 speech at Burkina Faso’s University of Ouagadougou, French President Emmanuel Macron had specifically promised “temporary or permanent restitution of African heritage”. A few years later, he appears to be delivering – or beginning to.
The return also helps the popularity of President Patrice Talon. His government has invested in a Beninese “cultural renaissance”, drawing attention away from criticism that it is authoritarian. Before Talon came to power in 2016, Benin had been considered one of Africa’s best examples of democratic governance.

But just months before the return of the artefacts, several opposition figures were barred from running against Talon, who ultimately got a second term with 86% of the vote in April 2021.
Fittingly, then, the second half of the film steers us towards civil society and what Beninese society has to say about all of this. Students and their teachers discuss the historic moment at a forum at the Université d’Abomey-Calavi.
One student remembers the artefacts being vaguely mentioned in high school, without emphasis on their deeper importance. Another muses about how his childhood was spent watching western animated shows but none centred around his own cultural heritage. Now, with precious little historical or cultural context, the young Beninese students are meant to receive, interpret, appreciate and eventually preserve the centuries-old artefacts. If, against these odds, the artefacts win the hearts and minds of the younger generation, they might continue the pursuit for the thousands of other cultural treasures that remain abroad.
But will they?
For now, they are still trying to figure out their relationship to them.
With care and understanding, Diop captures the complications of trying to reconnect with what once was – by both the artefacts and the Beninese people.
Today, the statue of King Ghezo and the other 25 returned artefacts are stored away somewhere in Benin. Plans for a museum in which they will be displayed for the public keep getting postponed. Dahomey opens the space for these bittersweet storylines to play out side by side.