The Amulet of Forgetting: The Amulet of Forgetting:: We Cannot Forget and We Cannot Forgive

International audience « One cannot forgive, but one can forget ». Proverb from Southern Benin.In Paris, France, the Quai Branly-Jacques Chirac Museum (MQB) preserves morethan 70,000 pieces of African cultural property, 46,000 of which entered during thecolonial 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 inNigeria). Since the 1990s, activists from Benin and its diaspora - including descendantsof King Behanzin exiled to Martinique in the late 19th century - have been calling forthe return of the colonial booty from the 1892 sack of Abomey, often referred to asthe treasure of Behanzin. In 2016, the government of the Republic of Benin requestedthe return of its cultural property. The restitution was rejected in the name of theFrench principle of inalienability of French national heritage. However, in 2017, inOuagadougou, Burkina-Faso, the French president Emmanuel Macron committed toreturn the African heritage. Following this declaration, the French National Assemblypassed an exceptional law allowing the return of 26 cultural properties to the Republicof Benin and one sword to Senegal. The other cultural belongings of the formerDanxome were not returned. Thus, and despite requests and mobilizations for itsreturn, so is the famous vodun deity Gou (Beaujean-Baltzer 2007; Murphy 2009, Tassiet 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 collectionof the merchant Édouard Foà, which entered a French ethnographic museum in1891.This collection includes agojiée bo, i.e. amulets that belonged to the warriorwomen of Abomey, known as Amazons. We will mention here a bo made of humanremains and an iguana head, designated as a “destructive bo” in the rare researchthat concerns it. If the story of its abduction sums up the original violence of Frenchcolonial collections, we are also interested in what several powerful women fromAbomey 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.