128 years after execution, France returns skull of King Toera to Madagascar

France has officially returned three colonial-era skulls to Madagascar, including one believed to belong to King Toera, who was executed and beheaded by French troops in 1897.

The restitution, which took place on Tuesday, marks the first return of human remains under a law passed in 2023 that allows France to hand back looted cultural and ancestral artifacts. Alongside King Toera’s skull, the remains of two other members of the Sakalava ethnic group were also repatriated.

Historians recall that French forces massacred local resistance fighters during the colonial conquest, decapitating King Toera and taking his skull to France as a war trophy.

It was 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,” said French Culture Minister Rachida Dati.

Her Madagascar counterpart, Volamiranty Donna Mara, praised the handover as “an immensely significant gesture” that marked “a new era of cooperation” between the two countries.

“Their absence has been, for more than a century, 128 years, an open wound in the heart of our island,” she said.

A joint scientific committee confirmed the skulls were from the Sakalava people but said it could only “presume” that one belonged to King Toera, Dati said.