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28-08-2025
PARIS/ ANTANANARIVO: France has returned to Madagascar three human skulls kept at a Paris museum for 128 years, after they were looted during the colonial period including one believed to be that of a Madagascan king decapitated by French troops.
The skull, presumed to be that of King Toera, and two others from the Sakalava ethnic group, were formally handed over at a ceremony held at the French Ministry of Culture on Tuesday.
French troops beheaded King Toera during a massacre of locals in 1897, with his skull then taken back to France as a trophy, and placed in Paris’s national history museum alongside hundreds of other remains from the Indian Ocean island.
“These skulls entered the national collections in circumstances that clearly violated human dignity and in a context of colonial violence,” French Minister of Culture Rachida Dati said at the event.
The French minister’s Madagascar counterpart, Volamiranty Donna Mara, praised the handover, saying the taking of the skulls “has been, for more than a century, 128 years; an open wound in the heart of our island”.
“They are not collectors’ items; they are the invisible and indelible link that unites our present to our past,” Mara said.
Video from the event showed three boxes draped in traditional cloth being carried in a solemn procession to the handover ceremony in the ornate surroundings of France’s Culture Ministry.
A joint scientific committee confirmed that the skulls were from the Sakalava people, but said it could only “presume” that one belonged to King Toera, Dati said.
The event marked the first restitution of human remains since France passed a law facilitating the return of such artefacts in 2023.
With a third of the 30,000 specimens at Paris’s Musee de l’Homme being skulls and skeletons from around the world, countries including Australia and Argentina have filed their own restitution requests for the return of ancestral remains.
During a visit in April to the Madagascan capital, Antananarivo, French President Emmanuel Macron spoke of seeking “forgiveness” for France’s “bloody and tragic” colonization of Madagascar, which declared independence in 1960 after more than 60 years of colonial rule.
The skulls are set to return to the Indian Ocean Island on Sunday, where they will be buried.
Minister Mara said the Madagascan government plans to honor the remains in a tribute coinciding with the anniversary of King Toera’s execution in late August 1897, during France’s colonization of the Indian Ocean Island.
To speed up the process, France’s parliament in 2023 adopted a law facilitating the repatriation of human remains.
With a third of the 30,000 specimens at Paris’s Musee de l’Homme made up of skulls and skeletons, countries including Australia and Argentina have filed their own restitution requests for ancestral remains.
France passed a separate law the same year to streamline the return of art looted by Nazis to Jewish owners and heirs but a third law enabling the return of property taken during the colonial era has not been finalized.
If approved, the legislation would make it easier for the country to return cultural goods obtained through theft, looting, coercion or violence between 1815 and 1972, according to the culture ministry.
A new version of the bill was presented at a government meeting in late July, with Dati saying she hoped it would be adopted “quickly”. (Int’l Monitoring Desk)
