The skull of a Malagasy king, decapitated by French troops during a bloody colonial assault in 1897, has finally been returned to Madagascar after more than a century in France.
On Tuesday, French authorities handed over the skull believed to belong to King Toera, along with those of two other members of the Sakalava ethnic group. The remains had been kept in Paris’s national history museum, where they sat among hundreds of other skulls taken from Madagascar during the colonial era.
King Toera was beheaded by French soldiers, with his skull carried away to France as a war trophy. For 128 years, his absence—along with that of others—was described by Madagascar’s leaders as a painful scar on the nation’s memory.
“These skulls entered the national collections in circumstances that clearly violated human dignity and in a context of colonial violence,” said French Culture Minister Rachida Dati during the handover.
Madagascar’s Culture Minister, Volamiranty Donna Mara, hailed the move as “an immensely significant gesture” and a chance to begin “a new era of cooperation” between both countries.
A joint Franco-Malagasy scientific team verified that the skulls were from the Sakalava people but could only “presume” that one belonged to King Toera. Still, the symbolic importance of the return was not lost on Madagascar, where the repatriation has been embraced as a long-overdue act of justice.
