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Article Dans Une Revue Jahazi Journal. Culture, arts, performance Année : 2022

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.
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hal-04473614 , version 1 (22-02-2024)

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  • HAL Id : hal-04473614 , version 1

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Saskia Cousin, Madina Yehouetome, Sara Tassi. The Amulet of Forgetting:: We Cannot Forget and We Cannot Forgive. Jahazi Journal. Culture, arts, performance, 2022. ⟨hal-04473614⟩
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