French director Mati Diop returns to the big screen with her hotly-anticipated follow up to the 2019 Senegalese coming-of-age ghost story Atlantics. With Dahomey, the Berlin Golden Bear winner, Diop continues examining the long arms of colonialism that strangle West African identity in the present day. In a taut 67 minutes, the industrious filmmaker follows the journey of 26 artefacts stolen from the former Kingdom of Dahomey as they are returned to Benin. She utilises surveillance and other fly-on-the-wall techniques to depict the journey, and, in a stroke of genius, Diop gives a voice to artefact number 26, a statue of King Ghézo. Through the statue’s eyes, and the voice and words of Haitian writer Makenzy Orcel, we are encouraged to sit with the gravity of having history itself torn from its homeland and displaced. Here we discuss her feelings on restitution and the generation coming up behind her.
You said in an interview that it took you a long time to realise what restitution really signified – what does restitution signify to you and at what point did the realisation come in the making of Dahomey ?
Get more Little White Lies
The word restitution is officially used to describe the process of repatriating objects once looted by colonial armies. But, to my opinion, an ancient colonial power like France can only repatriate. To restitute has a much deeper meaning. Restitution begins with us, artists, intellectuals, filmmakers or activists. It’s up to us to choose the meaning we give it. We can’t just rely on our governments; we have to take charge of this gesture by raising awareness in civil society. For me, restitution means first and foremost giving back a voice to African youth who have been dispossessed of their history. It also meant giving back to these despoiled works their agency.
What questions were you asking yourself when it came to the use of music in this film? And how were you able to transmit that to your collaborators?
It’s not a score composed especially for the film, but four separate tracks, two by Wally Badarou and two by Dean Blunt. I knew very early on where each track would fit in the editing. The music was in the editing from the very first days of it. I never changed my mind. I just met Wally Badarou in Paris and he told me that all the tracks he composes are potentially written for cinema.
The university debate format that features in the film is so much more fresh, vital and diverse than traditional talking heads – how did you come to include that sequence in the film?
It’s a paradigm shift, a counter-narrative. Have you ever heard young African students speak out on this subject? No. And yet they are the first to be concerned, because it is precisely these young people who, in addition to being deprived of mobility in the world, have been dispossessed of their history. It was high time we took up the subject of stolen artefacts from the point of view of the dispossessed. Once again, this is also what restitution should be about: this counter-view.
One of my favourite quotes from the student debate is, ‘They came and tore that from us and conditioned us to think we couldn’t tear it back.’ Do you have faith this conditioning can be combated in younger generations?
It’s impossible to talk about African youth in general but I think what emerges from the debate we hear in the film is the end of a state of stupefaction. We’re witnessing an awakening of consciousness. And that’s the key. The quote you are referring to comes from a very brave activist called Habib Ahandessi. Habib loudly denounces many of the injustices taking place in his country, Benin. We really must salute the courage of these young activists, wherever they come from in the world, in a context where freedom of expression is increasingly under threat. What recently gave me the most hope concerning African youth was the democratic revolution in Senegal a few months ago. We owe this victory to the young people who fought fiercely against the dictatorship to ensure that elections were held in the country. We’re undoubtedly at a turning point, and that’s what, somehow, I wanted to portray in Dahomey.
