The Royal Palaces of Abomey

The return of twenty-six objects from France to Benin in 2021 is the most consequential restitution to Africa so far, and the mechanism by which it happened is as important as the fact of it.

The taking. General Alfred Dodds captured Abomey in 1892 during the French conquest of Dahomey. Much of the palace complex was burned, and Dodds removed thrones, palace doors, carved statues of the kings and other regalia. They went to France, entered public collections, and were eventually held at the Musee du quai Branly in Paris. These were not archaeological finds. They were the working regalia of a state, taken as war spoil within living memory of the descendants who asked for them back.

The refusal. Benin made a formal request in 2016. France refused, on the doctrine of inalienability: objects in French public collections belong to the public domain and cannot legally be given away, transferred or deaccessioned. This is not a discretionary policy but a principle of French property law, and it had blocked every comparable claim for decades.

The turn. In 2017 President Macron said in Ouagadougou that African heritage should not be the prisoner of European museums, and commissioned Felwine Sarr and Benedicte Savoy to report. Their 2018 report recommended full restitution of objects taken without consent, and it was far more sweeping than the government had anticipated. What followed was narrower: a law passed in December 2020 specifically for these objects, creating a one-time exception to inalienability, and the twenty-six items were handed over in November 2021. They were exhibited in Cotonou to very large audiences.

Why the mechanism matters. France did not change the rule. It legislated around the rule, once, for a named list. That means the doctrine of inalienability stands intact and every subsequent claim must be argued from the beginning and requires its own act of parliament. It converted a question of principle into a series of individual political negotiations, which is a substantially weaker outcome for claimant countries than the Sarr-Savoy report proposed.

What the palaces are. An earthen complex of some forty hectares built up by twelve kings between 1625 and 1900, with bas-reliefs recording each reign in a fixed visual vocabulary. Dahomean kingship was a religious office: the kings' ancestors were served as deities, the iron asen staffs carried offerings to them, and the annual customs combined state ceremony with sacrifice: described at length by European visitors, and not always accurately, since exaggerated accounts of Dahomean bloodshed served the case for conquest.

Abomey's palace walls tell each king's reign in relief carving, and one part of that history involves an all-female military regiment that fought Dahomey's wars alongside, and sometimes instead of, the men.

Walls that function as a chronicle

The palace complex's clay bas-relief walls depict scenes symbolically representing the achievements and events of successive Dahomey kings' reigns, functioning collectively as a visual historical record maintained across generations, with each ruler's palace section typically adding its own portion to the wider chronicle rather than replacing what earlier kings had recorded.

Women who served as soldiers

The Kingdom of Dahomey maintained the Agojie, an elite corps of female warriors, sometimes referred to in European accounts as Amazons, who trained rigorously and served as a core military force for the kingdom across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, an institutional role for women in frontline combat unusual by the standards of most contemporary states, African or European.

A kingdom's complicated economic history

Dahomey was also a major participant in the transatlantic slave trade, both as a supplier of captives to European traders and as a state whose economy and military expansion were substantially financed by that trade, a historical role that sits directly alongside the kingdom's artistic and military achievements rather than being separable from them.