Dynastic History|Palais de la Marina, Cotonou — Home for Sixty-Six Days

The twenty-six objects returned from Paris were shown in Benin for the first time in February 2022, in the Palais de la Marina at Cotonou: the president's official residence, and the building that could offer the security and the climate control the works needed. The exhibition, Art du Bénin d'hier et d'aujourd'hui: de la Restitution à la Révélation, set the restituted royal statues, palace doors, portable altars and thrones alongside more than a hundred works by thirty-four living Beninese artists across some two thousand square metres. Entry was by online booking. It closed in May.

Then the objects went back into crates. They were packed between 5 and 13 January 2023, after roughly sixty-six days on display, and reporting by Justice Info that April found them still boxed: the interim venue meant for them, the old Portuguese fort at Ouidah, was unfinished. The permanent destination is the Musée des Rois et des Amazones du Danxomè, planned for the palace site at Abomey, a short walk from where the objects were carried out in 1892. The most recent account this run could verify, published in July 2025, described the twenty-six as still in store in Cotonou, with the Abomey museum under construction and an opening announced for the end of that year.

Transferring ownership took a signature and a morning. Building the room to put the objects in has taken longer, and the schedule has moved more than once.

📸 Cover: two of the returned Abomey palace doors in their case at the Cotonou exhibition, March 2022, Fawaz.tairou, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons