Mati Diop’s Dahomey Bridges The Past And Present Through Looted Colonial Artefacts


Emphatically, Dahomey sweeps into focus the other, many languages that got enslaved under the European grip. The retrieval of statues must also be recognised as what they were originally intended for, as rituals of worship. Putting the artefacts away in museums, a Western concept, as one puts it, only serves to de-sacralise them. Dahomey is a potent reclamation. People’s souls were looted, someone says. Through a keen, searching sense of enquiry, Diop revitalises objects and histories that risk erasure and oblivion, forging invigorating conversation between the ancestral and the youth.



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