The first major return of looted treasures from Europe to Africa in the 21st century has left a lingering feeling of humiliation because of the lack of follow-up action, a French-Senegalese filmmaker who accompanied a hoard of artefacts on their journey from Paris to their country of origin has said, reports The Guardian.
In her film Dahomey, which premiered at the Berlin film festival on Sunday, the director, Mati Diop, documents the 2021 journey of 26 treasures that the commander of French forces in Senegal looted from the royal palace of the kingdom of Dahomey, part of modern-day Benin, in 1890.
The return of the items from the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris, the first act of restitution by a former colonial power in Africa, had been announced three years earlier by the French president, Emmanuel Macron, triggering a Europe-wide movement of governments investigating their national collections and in some cases taking concrete steps to return parts of them.
Diop’s film not only records the joyous celebrations marking the objects’ arrival in Benin’s economic capital of Cotonou, but also shows young people debating the moment’s significance, given that thousands more artefacts remain in European collections. “Restituting 26 works out of 7,000 is an insult,” one student says.
Diop told a press conference after the film’s premiere: “These 26 works are good, but it’s not enough. It’s quite clear that there were way too few compared with the 7,000 works held captive in these museums, and I certainly think that it is humiliating.”
Musée du Quai Branly, France’s largest ethnological museum, holds 3,157 other objects from Benin in its collection. More are believed to reside in smaller museums and private collections.