Carved from a block of koro wood, the ceremonial throne consists of two tiers of figures supporting a platform seat: on the lower level, two armed soldiers stand guard over nine enslaved prisoners, shackled at the neck; above them, their king is attended by his queens and servants. The throne was stolen from Cana in the south of Abomey in November 1892 during the conquest of the kingdom of Danxomè (present-day Bénin), a bloody campaign led by Alfred-Amédée Dodds, a métis or mixed-race colonel of French and Senegalese descent. It spent nearly 130 years in “captivity” in French museums.

In 2021, after many years of waiting, 26 royal Danxomèan treasures—among them, the Cana throne—were repatriated from France to Bénin. As France, and much of the world, emerged from the COVID-19 lockdown, these treasures travelled from the Musée du quai Branly-Jacques Chirac in Paris to the Palais de la Marina, the presidential palace in Cotonou, where they were temporarily exhibited. The return of the treasures remains the most significant object restoration by a former colonial power to date. That transfer of treasures in 2021 is documented in the 2024 film Dahomey by Mati Diop, acclaimed director of the 2019 film Atlantics.

In Dahomey, Diop pans over the ceremonial throne from Cana to reveal the king seated beneath a large, fringed parasol. In the voice-over, a Béninese curator reads out from a description label: “The upper part of the throne depicts the king under his sunshade, surrounded by his maidservants.” He continues speaking as the camera descends, revealing the row of prisoners, flanked by their guards. Some prisoners appear to be muzzled. “A line of shackled slaves,” the curator notes. The next shot zooms in on one muzzled face before cutting to a shot of masked young men on scaffolding, arms raised against a cement ceiling, loosely mirroring the throne’s structure. Soon after, a richly clothed Béninese notable arrives for the grand opening of the exhibition. He is closely trailed by a masked attendant holding a fringed parasol.

The visual rhyme is striking and somewhat surprising (a COVID-19 mask echoes a muzzle). Its meaning, however, is far from clear. Is Diop suggesting that these forms of labor, separated by centuries, are somehow related or similar? That the people of Bénin remain “enslaved” to their present-day ruling class?

Such ambiguity runs through the broader visual grammar of Dahomey, which frequently equates African sculptures with living African bodies. Diop’s intercutting recalls films like Les statues meurent aussi (Statues Also Die, 1953) or Nii Kwate Owoo’s lesser-known You Hide Me (1970). But in a cinema openly grappling with questions of racial capitalism, reparations, and restitution, Diop’s reliance on mere visual equivalence to make points about historic injustice feels inadequate. At worst, the film risks reproducing the very structures of silencing and capture it critiques, by portraying the treasures’ return as a story of unambiguous liberation and coming-to-voice.

Both a documentary and the “notebook of a return to the native land,” Dahomey narrates the Danxomèan treasures’ epic journey home. And yet, the film remains haunted by the visible and invisible human labor that made this homecoming—and its cinematic telling—possible. Scenes of labor abound in Dahomey, but this labor is largely peripheral to the film’s central action. It plays out wordlessly in the background or in cutaway shots.

Throughout the film, we see—or hear—sweeping, soldering, sawing, plastering, painting, drilling, jackhammering, lifting, loading. Young men in hard hats scale scaffolding; shirtless men sweat in a printshop; armed security guards patrol; museum attendants survey; caterers carry trays. In other shots, workers simply loiter, scroll on their phones, or mill about the museum space being prepared in the palace, examining objects locked away behind glass. The face of labor in Dahomey is invariably young and male: Béninese men in their late teens and twenties, not professional actors but “real” workers featuring in unspeaking and uncredited roles. Their labor is expropriated and reproduced onscreen, where it continues to perform symbolic work.

More than a symbol, however, these laborers are the trace of a whole system that preceded Diop’s documentary and continue long after it wrapped: labors that paved the roads she and her crew travelled and that built the hotels in Cotonou they stayed in. Film scholars have long considered cinema itself to be the spectacular product and site of forms of material and immaterial labor. Elena Gorfinkel reminds us that films “screen and also screen out the labor that subtends them as aesthetic ‘works.’” And as David James writes in Allegories of Cinema (1989), because “every film … internalizes the conditions of its production, it makes itself an allegory of them.” Dahomey exemplifies both tendencies.

For Hannah Arendt, labor is meant to leave no trace, its products consumed in the very process of production. Yet Diop’s film preserves traces of labor that outlive the camera. Rather than being peripheral or ancillary to her cinematic world, might the labors we see onscreen be understood as the ground on which this world exists?

As debates around the repatriation of looted African art and artifacts gather urgency, Diop offers a timely and important intervention. However, the film’s spectacle of return seems predicated on the silence of the workers who bring it about. In Dahomey, Diop puts African labor as well as art on display. But who gets to speak within Diop’s economy of return?

Diop’s earlier film, the ghostly migration narrative, Atlantics, opened on a building site in Dakar. Dahomey, too, begins with scenes of manual labor. For the first several minutes of the film, we watch as lifts and lorries hoist larger-than-life West African statuettes off their pedestals in the Musée du quai Branly-Jacques Chirac and slowly lower them into padded wooden crates. They are going home.

The ceremonial throne, mentioned at the outset, is only one of several objects afforded a series of portrait-style close-ups. But the throne represents how Dahomey simultaneously highlights systems of inequality while remaining silent about its own entanglements in related systems. This is most evident when the film moves away from objects to focus on the people around them.

Much of Dahomey is slow cinema concerned with depicting slow labor. The labor most obviously on display throughout the film is the painstaking handling of the Béninese treasures as they are carefully packed and unpacked, catalogued and recatalogued, between Paris and Cotonou. Most of these tasks are carried out by French and African curators, curatorial assistants, and other museum employees.

These “skilled workers” form a stark visual contrast to Diop’s young African laborers. They are visibly older, often with a dusting of facial hair, sometimes bespectacled, and clothed in long white cotton lab coats and purple latex gloves. Rather than the straining of their bodies, Diop focuses on the skillful work of their gloved hands. This work is typically accompanied in the voice-over by the men’s own voices, as they read aloud object labels or note the conditions of objects. On both the visual and acoustic planes, Diop draws these men into the realm of skilled work, and away from the world of hard labor

However, their work, like Diop’s own, depends on a great deal of manual labor that her camera also captures. When the treasures first arrive in Cotonou, Diop films half a dozen or so young men in lime-green polos lowering a large wooden crate off a mechanic lift. Their shirts read Africa-dem (literally, “Africa goes”), revealing them to be young hires from a Senegal-based international moving company. A few minutes later, a crowd of young men hoist another massive wooden crate up the palace steps, attended by a few white (presumably French) overseers. Nearly all the people who lift or carry things in Dahomey are young Black African men—tracked by Diop’s steady cinematic gaze.

What is troubling about these “nonskilled” laborers in Diop’s cinema is not their marginality, but their muteness. The film’s extensive use of voice-over or voix-off magnifies the worker’s silence. In Dahomey, statues also speak (one treasure narrates in Fon); laborers do not. At no point in the film does the African laborer emerge fully from the background to address the camera in his own words, in his own voice, in his own name. His toil is visible but voiceless, his labor on display but off voice.

It is not clear if, or at what points in Dahomey, Diop is aware of this irony. Perhaps this silencing is intentional. Perhaps, throughout her film, Diop is in fact dramatizing—rather than simply perpetuating—the erasure of agency accompanying forms of manual labor.

But this does not get around the uneasy fact that the African laborer in Diop’s cinema remains “alienated” from and dispossessed of his labor, which is put to work onscreen. Belonging to the real world yet captured and reproduced in the film world, the laborer becomes the “human prop” of Dahomey. However, rather than returning to a back-lot storeroom when the cameras stop rolling, he keeps toiling out of sight.

The now-you-see-him-now-you-don’t figure of the African laborer thus exposes certain limits to Diop’s critique of neocolonial and capitalist structures. And this, in turn, raises questions about her cinema’s engagement with the material conditions of its own production and reception. Related questions might (and should) be asked of transnational coproductions more broadly, given their reliance on local labor. But Diop’s cinema is a compelling case study because her films rely materially and immaterially on the systems they critique.

It is troubling that Dahomey keeps its African laborers on the margins—and maintains their silence—yet also puts their material and immaterial labor on display, enlisting it in the work of filmic meaning-making.

It is in the apparently unscripted moments of Dahomey that questions of labor and economic precarity are thrown most sharply into focus. Near the end of the film, Béninese students debate what the return of these treasures might mean, or fail to mean, for them. Several students insist on the disconnect between the realities of everyday life in Bénin and the fanfare surrounding the treasures. In contrast to the African laborers we have seen throughout the film—all roughly the same age as these students—these young people are literally handed the mic and invited to voice their opinions.

Many of the students’ concerns revolve around questions of access and equity: how the museum might accommodate “the woman selling talé talé on the street,” not just the educated elite. Their questions point to the fact that without economic justice, the space of the museum will continue to matter little to the average person.

The scene recalls a moment near the end of Pasolini’s Notes Towards an African Orestes (1970), where the filmmaker gathers a group of African university students to review part of the film in which they now feature. Dahomey never quite achieves the same reflexivity (or vulnerability) as Pasolini’s mise en abyme. The film never turns its gaze back onto itself with the same deconstructing self-awareness. That is, the students assembled as talking heads at the end of Dahomey certainly question the institution of the museum and the limits of repatriation initiatives; but the project of the documentary film itself is never brought under scrutiny.

Even when Diop captures an obvious representative for her own project (a young woman who identifies herself as a filmmaker), the effect is to affirm rather than critically examine the whole enterprise. Everyone else—the construction workers, movers, security guards, and museum attendants—plays no part in this debate, even though they are the precondition of the film itself.

It is troubling that Dahomey keeps its African laborers on the margins—and maintains their silence—yet also puts their material and immaterial labor on display, enlisting it in the work of filmic meaning-making. It has been suggested that Diop’s films “attend to the ongoing neocolonial issues of labor exploitation and corrupt governance” and that this “attend[ing] to” has a “reparative” function. We should be prepared to ask who or what is being repaired, and where?

A recurring theme in Diop’s cinema, from Atlantics to Dahomey, is that what is repressed returns. The African laborer is no exception. Visible yet voiceless when onscreen, he nonetheless manages to make himself “heard,” even when out of sight. His offscreen toiling returns to trouble the diegetic world of the film. Labor forms the subliminal soundtrack to Dahomey. While someone speaks or music plays, what some spectators might only hear as diffuse background noise—or what some might fail to hear altogether—emerges from somewhere beyond the camera’s reach.

It is the sound of drilling, the scrape of metal tools on concrete, the buzz of a saw. It is the sound of Diop’s construction worker reminding us: I am still here, still toiling. 

Featured image: The shadow of a laborer in Mati Diop’s Dahomey (2024). All images courtesy of MUBI.