The issue of colonial memory in present-day restitution debates gets a movie articulation both analytical and politically uncomfortable in “Dahomey” (2024). Mati Diop offers the repatriation of twenty-six royal artifacts from the Kingdom of Dahomey, removed from France and returned to Benin, not as a plot of tidy restitution but as a terrain fraught with friction—between states that are constructing diplomatic narratives, museums that are asserting epistemic authority, and communities whose expectations live beyond the ceremonial language of return. The film’s aesthetic characterisation, informed by the experiences of its young Beninese participants and by the spectral existence attributed to the objects themselves, echoes what Sarr and Savoy (2018, p. 14) call the lasting “asymmetries of access and knowledge” that structure the trajectories of colonial plunder. Their report’s plea (Sarr & Savoy, 2018, p. 29) for a “new relational ethics” of restitution serves a critical interpretive frame within which one can comprehend the film’s interventions.
Diop’s cinematic approach, too, aligns with Appadurai’s (2017, p. 403) description of museum objects as “accidental refugees,” displaced by histories that institutional catalogues routinely do not represent adequately. In “Dahomey”, returning the objects does not render them as exiled objects; rather, it foregrounds the political economy of loss and recovery that Aguigah (2023, p. 163) calls central to debates about restitution. The conflicts he describes, across national sovereignty, transnational art markets, cultural diplomacy; appear repeatedly in the film’s juxtaposition of official ceremonies to public hesitations and critiques.
These tensions are not abstractions per se. They are contained in the itineraries of the artifacts themselves, whose provenance histories parallel the trajectories of violent procurement detailed in a report published by Bedorf (2021) for the Rautenstrauch-Joest Museum in Cologne (Germany), urging institutions to address the “illicit contexts of collection” and the ethical responsibilities such histories carry over into contemporary museum practice. The film’s contrapuntal montage, travel of royal objects to vernacular debates in Cotonou, recalls Mbembe and Nuttall’s (2004, p. 356) challenge to write the world in African urban contexts. Instead of placing restitution as an external concession by former colonial powers, Diop places its importance within an African public space that’s actively contemplating its own politics of memory. This is especially true of the students and young commentators who offer testimonies addressing not only France, who left behind the colonial legacy, but the way the Beninese state manages cultural heritage.
When we analyze the case of Dahomey in parallel with other restitution actions of the time, especially those related to the Benin Bronzes, we notice a deeper understanding of these tensions. Unlike the somewhat limited return of twenty-six royal objects from France to Benin, discussions about the Benin Bronzes took place in various European institutions, notably Germany and the United Kingdom, highlighting the structural complexity of restitution as a transnational process. The German government’s decision, formalized in 2021 and implemented through agreements with Nigerian authorities, involved not only the return of significant portions of museum collections but also the negotiation of shared custodianship, long-term loans, and the establishment of new museum infrastructures in Benin City (Bedorf, 2021). This framework underscores how restitution operates as an ongoing reconfiguration of legal ownership, curatorial authority, and diplomatic relations; very different to only restricted turn of return.
When we analyze the political economy behind restitution in depth, the case of the sword attributed to El Hadj Omar Tall, which traveled from France to Senegal in 2019, becomes clear. Unlike the Dahomey case, this restitution was initially presented as a renewable long-term loan, not as a complete legal transfer of ownership. This demonstrates the limitations imposed by French heritage legislation and the government’s hesitation to fully relinquish control over colonial-era collections. As Sarr and Savoy (2018) have already noted, such legal arrangements reveal the persistence of asymmetries embedded in the restitution process, where former colonial powers retain significant authority over the conditions of return. The Senegalese case thus exposes restitution as a negotiated and often partial concession shaped by juridical and diplomatic limits, for exemple.
At the same time, this case must be understood within the broader framework of France’s historical relations with West Africa, often described under the rubric of “Françafrique”. The repatriation of symbolic items occurs in a scenario where cultural diplomacy intersects with economic and political interests, raising questions about whether restitution acts as a reparative act or as a power adjustment. As Mbembe and Nuttal (2004) proposes when reflecting on African urban and political life, post-colonial sovereignty is frequently expressed through negotiations still linked to old imperial structures. In this context, restitution can symbolize both the recognition of historical aggressions and a strategic mechanism for preserving geopolitical relations. When analyzed alongside “Dahomey”, the Senegalese case shows that the ethics of return are inseparable from the political economies that define the flow of objects, demonstrating restitution as a process embedded in continuous negotiations about power, legitimacy, and historical responsibility.
In parallel, the British situation, especially the stance of the British Museum, demonstrates an opposite dynamic, where legal restrictions and institutional resistance have limited the scope of restitution, despite increasing political and popular pressure. As Hicks (2020) argued, this resistance reflects not only bureaucratic inertia, but the persistence of what he identifies as “colonial violence in the museum”, embedded in legal systems that continue to protect controversial collections. When read alongside “Dahomey”, these divergent trajectories reveal that restitution is deeply conditioned by national legal frameworks, museum governance structures, and geopolitical considerations. More importantly, they reinforce the argument that restitution cannot be understood solely through symbolic gestures or isolated returns, but must be analyzed as a field structured by uneven negotiations of power, responsibility, historical accountability and ambivalence.
Looking beyond Africa, instructive parallels can be found in debates about restitution in Latin America. There, issues concerning cultural heritage, indigenous legacy, and the power of museums have revealed similar tensions between the government and local communities. Although not always labeled as “restitution”, processes of returning indigenous remains and sacred objects, notably in Brazil, expose analogous conflicts over possession, representation, and authority of knowledge (Cesarino & Maciel, 2026). In these cases, the return of cultural goods often occurs within national structures that repeat, rather than break with, colonial hierarchies of knowledge and control.
This broader comparative view strengthens Appadurai’s (2017) thesis that museum objects act as “accidental refugees”, whose trajectories highlight the inequalities of value and displacement in the global circulation of culture. This also echoes the criticisms of Hicks (2020), who emphasizes that restitution must address the history of acquisition and the current structures that still govern access, interpretation, and legitimacy. Along with the cases of Dahomey, Senegal, and the Benin Bronzes, these Latin American experiences show that restitution goes beyond a bilateral exchange between colonizer and colonized. It is, in fact, a broader field of dispute where various actors (governments, museums, communities, and international networks) debate the meanings and futures of displaced cultural heritage. Thus, “relational responsibility” emerges as a dynamic practice shaped by historically situated power relations.
Doing so, the film refuses the narrative closure that, more often than not, restitution ceremonies seek to stage. This skepticism is rooted in historical awareness. Similarly, Law’s (1997) analysis of Dahomey’s political changes in the nineteenth century sheds light on the “longue durée” of conflict, changing trade patterns, and internal factional rivalries that influenced the kingdom’s cultural production. In situating that historical context “vis à vis” current debates, “Dahomey” complicates an effort to characterize restitution as an administrative exercise in itself, unconnected to the histories of violence, negotiation and resistance that informed the pathways through which the artifacts traveled.
Rather than reenact familiar binaries that undergird debates over restitution (origin versus destination, victim versus perpetrator, preservation versus repatriation), the movie urges a reading that goes away from such bifurcations, and towards the multidimensionality of returns themselves, with ambiguity. “Dahomey” refuses to present restitution as moving in some fluid orbit between two stable poles, but exposing shifting constellations of actors, institutions and temporalities that make a hard divide inadequate. By showing how the returned objects move through multiple regimes of meaning, acting as diplomatic tools and mnemonic conduits at the same time as aesthetic and ethical presences, Diop establishes restitution as a relational process wherein the return seems less “closure” than “actively” unfolding negotiation.
Such refusal of binary forms of framing chimes with wider attacks on heritage politics, such as that of the earlier critics concerned with reduction to gestures of symbolic recognition or purely material redress in return for restitution. The trajectories of these objects throughout the film reveal interwoven claims made by multiple agentes; those who demand the political legitimacy of the objects to preserve them, those who seek its custodial power among a museum or artist, those who want different aesthetic futures, and those who demand a new means of stewardship. Then indeed, restitution becomes something beyond of a transaction between two antithetical actors. It is a process, changing over time, of increasingly overlapping obligations.
In this regard, Hicks (2020) provides an interesting theoretical complement to Diop’s visual case. Hicks’s (2020, p. 41) criticism of what he refers to as “salvage narratives” resonates with the film’s contention that museums frequently recast themselves as benevolent protectors even as they obscure the violent conditions under which collections were initially constructed. In many of these sequences, Diop represents museum spaces as sites of contestation of interpretation, a perspective echoed in Effiboley’s (2020) examination of the legal and moral duties that Western institutions face with regards to modern repatriation discourses.
The film’s most unusual formal move is arguably to give narrative voice to one of the things returned. This device operates not just as poetic experimentation, activating what Taxier (2020, p. 604) identifies as the “ambiguous agency” that objects attribute to object-oriented aesthetic interpretation. By giving voice to the object, the film disrupts hierarchized regimes of knowledge and suggests a historiographical sensibility that, rather than narrating the same object’s own itineraries, challenges the interpretive authority that states and museums typically claim.
The film intentionally does not fully define the linguistic identity of the speaking object, but the sound strongly evokes the linguistic structures and vocalizations of the Fon people, linked to the ancient territory of the Kingdom of Dahomey. This imprecision is relevant. The object’s speech is not a simple recovery of an “authentic” pre-colonial voice. It emerges as a spectral and mediated presence, situated between memory, cinematic construction, and contemporary political imagination. In this sense, Diop avoids transforming language into a mere symbol of cultural purity. The speaking object does not restore an untouched past; instead, it reveals the fractures caused by colonial displacement and the impossibility of fully recovering the original contexts of meaning. This approach echoes Mbembe’s (2001) reflections on the complex temporalities of the post-colonial African experience in which memory operates through discontinuities, absences, and recompositions, and not through linear restoration.
This tension becomes even more evident when considering the disproportion between the twenty-six objects returned to Benin and the estimated thousands of Dahomean artifacts that remain in the collections of French museums. Many of these objects entered museums through distinct paths: some were seized directly during the French military conquest of Abomey in 1892, while others subsequently circulated through private collections, missionary networks, colonial administrators, and art markets during the 20th century (Steiner, 1994). The restitution staged in “Dahomey”, therefore represents only a fragment of a much larger colonial dispersal. As Sarr and Savoy (2018) emphasize, the issue at stake is not merely numerical restitution, but the persistence of institutional asymmetries that continue to regulate the ownership, interpretation, and access to African cultural heritage. The selective return of a limited number of objects simultaneously acknowledges colonial violence and reveals the continued reluctance of European institutions to fundamentally restructure the material geography of their collections.
At the same time, the film’s focus on young Beninese audiences introduces another crucial dimension: the pedagogical legacy of restitution. Some of the concerns expressed in public debates about the return of objects involve the relatively limited museum infrastructure in Benin and the absence, in certain contexts, of what commentators describe as a consolidated “museum visitation culture”. However, framing this issue solely through institutional lack risks reproducing colonial assumptions that equate the legitimacy of heritage with European museum models. Diop’s film complicates this perspective, showing that the pedagogical value of restitution can also emerge through public debate, community memory, artistic reinterpretation, and new forms of cultural engagement outside the museum itself. In this sense, restitution acquires importance not only through conservation infrastructures but also through its capacity to reactivate historical consciousness and generate new public relationships with the past. Instead of asking whether Benin possesses sufficient museum culture to “receive” the objects, the film invites a different question: how can restitution itself transform the conditions under which cultural memory becomes publicly meaningful?
This narrative strategy also aligns with an underlying transition that has emerged in recent scholarship, and has been highlighted by Sarr and Savoy (2018): that restitution is not simply about a physical transfer, but also about epistemic restitution processes that repair interpretive agency within African communities. “Dahomey” makes visible the tensions caused by such overlapping dimensions of return. And while the Beninese government cheers the objects’ arrival as a diplomatic success, the voices of students, artists, and local historians undermine the story of this triumph by inquiring how these artifacts will be preserved, displayed, and mobilized in local contexts. As noted in a report written by Bedorf (2021) for the Rautenstrauch-Joest Museum, restitution must entail durable infrastructures, ongoing community consultation, and transparent provenance research to make it meaningful and workable. Without these conditions, the return process risks ending up largely symbolic.
Thus, “Dahomey” from that angle can be seen as a continued meditation on ethics and returns, in plural. The film raises questions that remain open: the institutional fragility of heritage infrastructures in many postcolonial states, the uneven distribution of resources around conservation, and the pervasive power asymmetries embedded into international cultural law. As noted by the Athena Art Foundation (2022) in their commentary on the active reworking of Benin’s artistic heritage, returning is a practice of reparations of cultural history; it is not only a physical act of reclaiming objects but also a restructuring of interpretive architectures with which to interpret cultural histories.
At this point, it becomes necessary to question the very notion of “return” that underpins much of the restitution debate. The expression evokes the idea of reclaiming an original condition, a return to a previous state of belonging that can be fully revived. However, as the examples presented here demonstrate, this return is rarely complete or definitive. Objects that have traveled paths through colonial systems, museum classifications, and global markets do not merely “return”; they arrive modified, bringing with them multiple layers of uprooting, reinterpretation, and institutional framing. As Appadurai (2017) suggests through the notion of objects as “accidental refugees” their trajectories disrupt any linear understanding of origin and destination.
In this sense, what is commonly described as restitution might be more accurately understood as a process of re-inscription rather than return. The objects re-enter new political, institutional, and epistemic contexts that are themselves shaped by postcolonial asymmetries. Hicks (2020) argues that the violence inherent in colonial appropriation does not simply disappear with transfer, especially when the bases of interpretation and power remain unequal. The idea of “return”, therefore, can obscure the constant negotiations, tensions, and power imbalances that shape these processes. Instead of an endpoint, restitution should be seen as an open and contested field, where the meanings of possession, heritage, and responsibility are constantly redefined.
Seen through this lens, the film builds on a broader movement toward a reconceptualization of restitution that’s organized not around the ideas of the return (in some kind of moment or another), but rather in relations of meanings. Returning artifacts bear the colonial violence scar of their original form, and, at the same time, become touchstones new and emerging forms of social work and group memory. By making these interlocking dynamics visible, “Dahomey” therefore intervenes in contemporary debates concerned about the ethical, political and public implications of restitution all over Africa today in a critical way.