On Tuesday, August 26, France returned three colonial-era skulls to Madagascar during a handover at the French Culture Ministry in Paris, including one believed to be that of King Toera. The restitution was the first under a 2023 framework law designed to speed up repatriations of human remains that previously required a special act of parliament, according to Le Monde. The skulls were scheduled to travel to Madagascar on Sunday for burial after ceremonies.
At the ceremony, the skull attributed to King Toera and two others from the Sakalava ethnic group were handed to his descendants and to Malagasy authorities, with a traditional Sakalava intermediary confirming the monarch’s identity. A joint scientific committee confirmed the skulls were from the Sakalava people but said it could only presume that one belonged to King Toera, and there was no genetic evidence to prove it after earlier tests were inconclusive, according to BBC News. “Scientifically, it is permissible to assume that one of these skulls is his, without absolute certainty,” said Rachida Dati, the French culture minister.
“These skulls entered the national collections under conditions that clearly violated human dignity and occurred during a period of colonial violence,” said Dati. “This ceremony also symbolised the completion of a historical, scientific, and memorial process between our two nations,” she added.
King Toera was killed and decapitated nearly 130 years ago by French colonial forces during an attack at Ambiky, the former royal capital of Menabe, after he had surrendered to the soldiers. His head was taken to Paris as a trophy and placed in the Museum of Natural History, which housed remains from Madagascar and other parts of the world; the museum held more than 20,000 human remains for supposedly scientific reasons.
Volamiranty Donna Mara, Madagascar’s culture minister, hailed the return as “an immensely significant gesture,” emphasizing its cultural and emotional importance for the Sakalava community and the nation. “They are not collectors’ items; they are the invisible and indelible link that unites our present to our past,” she said. Residents had waited for more than twenty years, with the first formal request from King Toera’s descendants dating to 2003.
The Ambiky massacre formed part of the early phase of French colonization in Madagascar. In August 1897, a French force sent to establish colonial control over the Menabe Sakalava kingdom defeated local forces and massacred people in the royal village of Ambiky. The public execution and beheading of King Toera became a symbol of colonial violence on the island.
France framed the handover as part of a broader effort to confront its colonial past. Since his election in 2017, President Emmanuel Macron acknowledged past French abuses in Africa. He sought “torgiveness” for France’s “bloody and tragic” colonization of Madagascar, he said during an April visit to Antananarivo. Madagascar declared independence in 1960 after more than 60 years of French colonial rule.
A separate bill to enable the return of cultural goods obtained through theft, looting, coercion, or violence between 1815 and 1972 was not yet finalized; a new version was presented at a government meeting in late July, and Dati said she hoped the bill would be adopted quickly. In parallel, France in 2023 passed a law to streamline the return of art looted by Nazis to Jewish owners and heirs.
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