Gift of General Dodds

I was visiting Benin, taking pictures of a palace in Abomey, when a prince with a machete made a grab for my phone. He was shirtless, angry, and wearing a beautiful slumped cap, done in black velvet and embroidered with silver stars. He was speaking Fon, but I could tell that he was angry—not with me but with my guide, who paraphrased their argument in French. Seated just behind him on the motorcycle, two languages removed, I tried to make out the details of our lèse-majesté.

The prince was a groundskeeper—that’s what the machete was for—but he was also accustomed to receiving royalties from visitors. This privilege, recently and without explanation revoked by the Bureau of Tourism, was an inheritance from his ancestor, King Tegbesu. Tegbesu had built the palace that crumbled behind us, now nothing more than a gate with walls, a blood-red heap under the sky’s chalk-dusted blue. Photographing, even just looking at this heirloom, would cost money. So we gave him a few thousand francs and drove off. As he shrank with the walls, I watched him stuff the colorful bills down the front of his pants, leaving, on the sparkling hair below his navel, a smear of orange earth.

• • •

On 16 November 1892, French troops reached Abomey, then capital of the Kingdom of Dahomey. The city was in flames, burned by King Béhanzin when France refused his terms of surrender. He began with his own sprawling compounds, then set fire to the homes of his subjects, compelling everyone to follow his retreat. The blaze was three kilometers wide, and it scorched the city’s sanguine walls to pitch. Guerrilla struggles would follow, but this was the formal conclusion of the Franco-Dahomean Wars, one front in the “scramble for Africa” which by 1914 would leave nearly the entire continent in European hands. The conflict began in 1890, when the French—already master of large swaths of West Africa—turned their pith helmets and howitzers on Dahomey, their partner for centuries in the slave and palm oil trades. Nine months of fighting won them rights to the port city of Cotonou. And in 1892, after a short truce, France came back to take the whole kingdom. The press pitched in before this second war even began. Three months before the start of the campaign, Le Petit Journal printed a color lithograph of King Béhanzin, enthroned among skulls and guarded by a woman warrior. “He doesn’t speak a single European language,” the article remarks. “Our country will easily finish him.”^[1]

The man who did the finishing was Colonel Alfred-Amédée Dodds, a Senegalese métis and one of the most experienced officers in the French colonies. Dodds had put down riots on the Indian Ocean island of Réunion, led expeditions against the Serer and Fula in Senegal, and played a decisive role in the capture of what is now Hanoi, Vietnam.^[2] Now in Dahomey, less than six months after his arrival, he had all but destroyed West Africa’s most powerful independent state. His troops entered Abomey on the morning of 17 November, setting up their bivouac in the still-smoking ruins of Béhanzin’s palace. They were a mixed bunch—pith-helmeted French marines, Senegalese cavalrymen, allied warriors from the nearby kingdom of Porto-Novo, and hundreds of local porters, two of whom carried Colonel Dodds to the city in a hammock.^[3]

Looting began almost immediately after the French flag was hoisted over Béhanzin’s palace. The invaders, primed by travelers’ tales of Abomey’s wealth, were quickly disappointed by the king’s leavings—mostly alcohol, textiles, and half-functioning guns. But the mood of anticlimax quickly lifted. Soldiers, drunk on the king’s Dutch gin, gamboled through the ruined courtyards in billowing Dahomean skirts, taking shade under the huge appliquéd parasols of courtiers. They turned over the soil, and found under it cannons, blunderbusses, statuettes, bracelets and necklaces of cowrie shell and coral—a city’s worth of hurriedly hidden treasures. The clearing before the colonel’s tent became “a veritable bazaar” of plunder.^[4]

The ordinary soldiers took what they could, anxiously watching the bulging parcels of their officers, whom they suspected of requisitioning the best of the loot. They were right. Dodds, promoted by telegram to the rank of general, had amassed a collection of artifacts including silver scepters, ancestral altars, intricately carved palace doors, and King Béhanzin’s golden throne. But the real prize was a set of three therianthropic statues, life-sized half-man, half-animal portraits of Dahomean kings. These were the royal bocio, magic battle standards hewn by the court carver, Sosa Adede, from the trunks of trees. A sword in each hand, looming over the troops, the bocio were wheeled to the front lines of battles. They were expected, in urgent circumstances, to come alive and fight.^[5]

Le Petit Journal had published lithographs of other “garish … painted gods,” captured in an earlier battle, whose powers had failed to save them from “our heroic little soldiers.” But it might be nice, an editorialist mused, if the marines brought “us back some of these spiteful guardians of the Dahomeans … they won’t miss the wood.”^[6] The writer got his wish. In 1893, Dodds donated his finest finds, including the three bocio, to Paris’s Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro. Since then, the three royal bocio have been almost continuously on display in Paris—first as trophies, then as ethnographic curiosities, and finally as works of art. Millions of people have seen them, including Pablo Picasso and Guillaume Apollinaire, who visited them at the Trocadéro before it closed in 1935.^[7] They were then moved to the ethnographic Musée de l’Homme.

Since 2006, they have been held by the Musée du quai Branly, a controversial rebranding of France’s larcenous legacy as a broad-minded homage to non-Western art. The Dahomean bocio are mounted on three high cylinders in the main collections hall. Guezo, broad-chested and iron-colored, leaning back as though about to strike; Glele, the lion, his blunt snout snapping with tiny, filed teeth; and Béhanzin, the shark, green as a tank and missing a portion of his fearsome jaw. Frozen in the bent-legged, forearm-out posture of fencers, the statues stand back-to-back in a defensive huddle—staring, as though encircled, at the dimly lit expanse. At the base of each figure, a small plaque reads, “Gift of General Dodds.”

• • •

The plunder of art is now recognized as a crime under international law. A latter-day Dodds would have to contend with more than half a century of treaties, the most important of which, the 1954 Hague Convention on the Protection of Cultural Property, was adopted after the looting of European museums and private collections during World War II.^[8] This convention and the treaties that followed it have frequently been observed, even by powerful occupiers with little incentive to do so.^[9] But the treasures of Dahomey, stolen sixty years too early, are still subject to the “finders keepers” convention. Excepting the occasional “loan” of smaller pieces to museums in Benin, they seem likely to remain where they are, if not without objection.^[10] In 2013, Nicéphore Soglo, former president of Benin, and Louis-George Tin, head of CRAN (the representative council of black associations in France), called for the return of France’s “biens mal acquis” (ill-gotten gains) in a strident editorial for Le Monde.^[11] It was about as effective as Béhanzin’s bocio were on the battlefield—which is to say, not at all.

But one can dream. In Ishmael Reed’s satirical novel Mumbo Jumbo (1972), a multinational cell of art thieves called the Mu’tafikah orchestrate an elaborate plan to liberate the “Ikons of aesthetically victimized civilizations” from “Centers of Art Detention” across Europe and America. The masterstroke in their worldwide effort is a heist at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where they plan to seize a massive Olmec head from Mexico. Art world warriors from every continent, the members of the Mu’tafikah plan not just to return what was stolen, but to create “renewed enthusiasms” for non-Western traditions.^[12] Restoration is not merely a remedy for past injustice, but the beginning of new creation.

One Beninese artist who would make a good Mu’tafikah is Romuald Hazoumè, who recently exhibited an unusual egungun at the Fondation Zinsou gallery in Cotonou. This sacred Yoruba masquerade, a representative from ancestral spirits, is traditionally a sumptuous, sequined costume, veiled in a long fall of cowrie shells. But Hazoumè’s, no less elaborate, is made of street trash, assembled from the kerosene canisters that litter every corner of motorcycle-choked Cotonou. Garishly red, blue, yellow, and black, it trails its greasy skirts before the reverent crowd—a gathering of canister faces arranged in a semicircle around it. These are only surrogates for the work’s ultimate audience. Hazoumè has offered the mask, and others like it, in exchange for the real Yoruba egungun detained in Western museums. But he has received no answer. From the world’s Centers of Art Detention has come only that sound so familiar to their visitors—silence.