By
David Edgar
PhD Anthropology
“Aaah… ehhh… ohhhh…” says Pepe as he tries to find his own voice. Pepe is a dead hippopotamus—and the eponymous narrator of a wild, uncategorizable hybrid documentary about his own life written and directed by Dominican auteur, Nelson Carlos de los Santos Arias. A similarly unexpected character narrates Dahomey, a coolly radical documentary by celebrated French-Senegalese filmmaker Mati Diop. Dahomey charts the repatriation of twenty-six treasures to Benin—with one of the statues itself as our guide. With his strange, distorted voice he tells us, as he is being boxed up for his journey, “I journeyed so long in my mind, it was so dark in this foreign place…everything is so strange, so far removed from this land I saw in my dreams”.
Both of these experimental documentaries centre subjects who have been violently transplanted from Africa. As the statues featured in Dahomey were looted from the Kingdom of Dahomey by the French in 1892, Pepe was amongst a host of animals captured in Namibia and brought by drug baron Pablo Escobar to Colombia to be part of his menagerie. These films offer a portrait of the painful consequences of colonialism, despite flashes of hope and resilience. Pepe, unlike the statues in Dahomey, never made it home, but he did experience brief freedom amongst his brethren when they escaped the confines of Escobar’s zoo and lived wild in the Magdalena River (the original herd has grown to around 200 today, posing an ethical quandary). Pepe’s story ends tragically: he is mercilessly hunted and slain by Colombian soldiers led by a rifle-toting German hunter in khakis—an image in which the violence of the Colombian state mixes with the iconography of European colonialism. Diop is careful to avoid triumphalism with Dahomey—we learn that the twenty-six items being returned to Benin are an insulting fraction of what remains in France. And as a statue is taken from one antiseptic museum in France to another glass case in Benin, and laid face down in a box en route, we must ask if this is the dignified homecoming that he deserves. He does not even reclaim a name: he remains “26”, even to himself, an item in a shipping manifest.
Both of these experimental documentaries centre subjects who have been violently transplanted from Africa.
“Is that noise mine? What is this thing I use to make it?” asks Pepe, after his guttural noise experiments (the “Aaah… ehhh… ohhhh…”). These are films that explore the question: What if the subaltern really could speak? I’m paraphrasing postcolonial scholar Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak here, a particularly appropriate reference for Dahomey. Here, it seems, they do–vigorously. Almost the whole of the second half of Diop’s film is given over to Beninise voices, debating energetically at the University of Abomey-Calavi. The conversation is fascinating, not least because the tedious question about whether repatriation should happen is moot (a conversation that, unbelievably, rolls on here in the UK). It’s a relief to cast aside that tedious will-they-wont-they debate about returning looted artefacts. A glorious polyphony of voices debate far more interesting topics (never reaching neat consensus): Is the return of these 26 objects a triumph? An insult? Where are the rest? Are these objects sacred? Or art?
Despite the raucous chorus of Beneinse voices here, Diop finds that the colonised voice is sometimes strained, often compromised. Can the vanquished people of the Kingdom of Dahomey speak? Diop’s boldest, and most enigmatic move, is to give the statue a voice. In one sense, this is the miraculous voice of a vanquished Kingdom, from which the contemporary Beninese have been violently separated, and whom scholarship has overlooked. The statue may not have a name that is really his, but he does have a voice. It is the voice that has been silenced, and haunts contemporary discursive noise and events of the film. But I think it’s not just a case of resurrecting a human voice. By giving this object a voice, Diop also radically extends agency beyond the human. This might be seen to acknowledge claims that sacred objects don’t just represent ancestors but are ancestors (not that the film indicates this is part of West African kinship beliefs necessarily, and I am not qualified to comment). But it also chimes with anthropological thinking that insists humans are not alone in having agency. Similarly, we could say that the hippo-narrator of Pepe is a stand-in for the trafficked African, and the escaped herd a kind of palenque (communities in Latin America founded by enslaved peoples), and so the film is an exercise in telling an under-told story. But we must also see the hippo as a hippo, and consider how de los Santos Arias asks us to acknowledge the agency of non-human animals.
But, ultimately, these films chart the impossibility of speaking in one’s own terms. One speaker in the university scene in Dahomey laments that she speaks in French, not the local language, Fon (which the film periodically dips in and out of, sometimes within the same sentence). Pepe, too, is a tapestry of European colonial and African languages: Spanish, German, and English alternating with Mbukushu, and Afrikaans. I think what is at stake in both films is that the subaltern must shape themselves in order to be legible to hegemonic authority. This epistemological violence haunts colonialism, but also our attempts to attend to agency beyond the human: the statue and the hippo must be anthropomorphic, and speak human languages, to be understood. Pepe is particularly strident in its critique of the failure of imagination when it comes to the hippopotamus, invoking both natural history documentary to a Hanna Barbera style cartoon (created especially by the filmmaker after he failed to secure rights to show an existing cartoon about a hippo). Pepe disappears almost completely as the film drifts into a road movie and then a domestic melodrama. The dignity of Pepe, as a non-human, is failed by the narrative tools available to us; he can only elicit sympathy as “Pepe”. As he says, “my story could only be told when it became their story.”
