The Amulet of Forgetting:
Résumé
« One cannot forgive, but one can forget ». Proverb from Southern Benin.
In Paris, France, the Quai Branly-Jacques Chirac Museum (MQB) preserves more
than 70,000 pieces of African cultural property, 46,000 of which entered during the
colonial period. 3,157 objects are believed to have come from the former Danxome
(Dahomey), now the Republic of Benin (not to be confused with Benin City, located in
Nigeria). Since the 1990s, activists from Benin and its diaspora - including descendants
of King Behanzin exiled to Martinique in the late 19th century - have been calling for
the return of the colonial booty from the 1892 sack of Abomey, often referred to as
the treasure of Behanzin. In 2016, the government of the Republic of Benin requested
the return of its cultural property. The restitution was rejected in the name of the
French principle of inalienability of French national heritage. However, in 2017, in
Ouagadougou, Burkina-Faso, the French president Emmanuel Macron committed to
return the African heritage. Following this declaration, the French National Assembly
passed an exceptional law allowing the return of 26 cultural properties to the Republic
of Benin and one sword to Senegal. The other cultural belongings of the former
Danxome were not returned. Thus, and despite requests and mobilizations for its
return, so is the famous vodun deity Gou (Beaujean-Baltzer 2007; Murphy 2009, Tassi
et al. 2016), currently on display at the Pavillon des Sessions in the Louvre in Paris.
Other collections have been almost forgotten. This is particularly true of the collection
of the merchant Édouard Foà, which entered a French ethnographic museum in
1891.This collection includes agojiée bo, i.e. amulets that belonged to the warrior
women of Abomey, known as Amazons. We will mention here a bo made of human
remains and an iguana head, designated as a “destructive bo” in the rare research
that concerns it. If the story of its abduction sums up the original violence of French
colonial collections, we are also interested in what several powerful women from
Abomey say about it in 2021. According to their testimony, it is a “bo of forgetting,”
that is, a magical power that causes forgetting and confusion.