Paris (TDI): In a solemn ceremony at France’s Ministry of Culture, Paris formally handed over three human skulls, looted during one of the colonial era’s massacres, to Madagascar, yesterday.
Among the skulls is one presumed to belong to King Toera of the Sakalava people, who was beheaded by French troops in 1897, during a violent campaign in the Menabe region.
The other two skulls are believed to be those of Sakalava warriors. All three were kept in Paris’s Museum of National History, as part of its colonial era collections.
French Minister of Culture, Rachida Dati, described the return as a “historic event,” adding that “these skulls entered the national collections in circumstances that clearly violated human dignity and in a context of colonial violence.”
Her counterpart from Madagascar, Volamiranty Donna Mara, spotlighted the emotional and cultural weight of the return, calling the skulls an essential link to the past, and not items that can be put in museum collections.
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“Their absence has been, for more than a century, 128 years, an open wound in the hearts of the Big Island and particularly of the Sakalava community of Menabe,” she said.
This event is the first repatriation of human remains under a French law passed in December 2023. The law mandates the return of ancestral remains and cultural artifacts previously locked in public collections.
A joint scientific committee has authenticated the Sakalava origin of the skulls but there is no way to fully establish that one of these belongs to King Toera.
Madagascar plans to commemorate the return with an event that will coincide with the anniversary of King Toera’s execution in late August 1897, hoping to close a long-standing chapter of grief and remembrance.
France colonized Madagascar in 1896 overthrowing the Marina monarchy. The colonial rule is recorded in history as brutal, where mass executions and torture were rampant. Madagascar finally became independent in 1960.
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