Dynastic History|Musée du Quai Branly, Paris — Twenty-Six Objects and One Statute

In May 2021 three carved royal statues stood in the Dahomey section of the musée du quai Branly in Paris with panels beside them announcing that they were leaving. The museum catalogues them as the anthropomorphic statues of Ghezo, Glele and Béhanzin. They reached France as the spoils of General Alfred Dodds, taken from the Abomey palaces in 1892 and handed by him to the Musée d'ethnographie du Trocadéro; from there they passed to the Musée de l'Homme and then into the collection of the quai Branly, which opened in 2006.

Benin asked for them formally on 26 August 2016. Objects in French public collections are inalienable by law, so the first answer was no. A report by Felwine Sarr and Bénédicte Savoy on African heritage in French museums followed in November 2018, and the return in the end required a statute of its own: law no. 2020-1673 of 24 December 2020, which covered these twenty-six objects and a sabre going to Senegal, and nothing beyond them. A ceremony was held at the museum on 27 October 2021. The transfer of ownership was signed at the Élysée on 9 November, and the crates flew to Cotonou the following day.

Twenty-six is a small number set against what French collections hold from the same region and the same decades. Benin's government said at the time that it was seeking fuller restitution; which objects move next, and under what legal instrument, has not been settled. The Paris gallery has been rearranged around the space they left.

📸 Cover: the three royal statues in the quai Branly's Dahomey display in May 2021, beside labels announcing their restitution, Munfarid1, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons