France has returned three colonial-era skulls to Madagascar, including one believed to belong to King Toera, a monarch executed and beheaded by French troops during their 1897 colonial conquest.
This historic restitution, which took place on Tuesday, is the first under a 2023 law enabling France to repatriate looted cultural and ancestral artifacts.
Alongside King Toera’s skull, the remains of two other members of the Sakalava ethnic group were also handed back.
Historians recount the brutal events surrounding King Toera’s death, noting that French forces massacred resistance fighters and took his skull to France as a war trophy.
For over a century, it was displayed in Paris’s National Museum of Natural History, alongside hundreds of other human remains from Madagascar.
French Culture Minister Rachida Dati acknowledged the dark legacy of colonial violence, stating: “These skulls entered the national collections in circumstances that clearly violated human dignity and in a context of colonial violence.”
Her Malagasy counterpart, Volamiranty Donna Mara, hailed the return as “an immensely significant gesture,” describing the absence of the remains for 128 years as “an open wound in the heart of our island.”
While a joint scientific committee confirmed the skulls belonged to the Sakalava people, it could only “presume” that one of them was King Toera’s. Despite this, the handover has been celebrated as a symbolic act of healing and reconciliation.
France’s President Emmanuel Macron previously expressed hopes that such gestures could foster “forgiveness” over the “bloody and tragic pages”of colonization.
