Three human skulls, including one believed to belong to a Madagascan king who was killed by French forces, have been returned to Madagascar after 128 years in a Paris museum.
At a ceremony held on Tuesday at the French Ministry of Culture, it is believed that King Toera and two other Sakalava ethnic people are the subjects of the skull’s ceremonial presentation.
King Toera’s skull was beheaded by French soldiers in an 1897 massacre of locals, which led to his return to France as a trophy and was later deposited in Paris’s national history museum along with hundreds of other remains from the Indian Ocean island.
At the event, French Minister of Culture Rachida Dati stated, “These skulls entered the national collections in circumstances that clearly violated human dignity and in a context of colonial violence.”
Volamiranty Donna Mara, the minister’s representative in Madagascar, praised the handover, claiming that the skull removal “has been an open wound in the heart of our island for more than a century, 128 years.”
They are the invisible and indelible link that connects our present and past, according to Mara, not the work of collectors.
Three traditional-clothed boxes were carried in a solemn procession to the handover ceremony in France’s lavish surroundings by video from the event.
According to Dati, a joint scientific committee said it was possible to “presume” that one of the skulls belonged to King Toera, but that it could only be “presume” that it belonged to him.
Since France passed a law allowing the return of such artefacts in 2023, this was the first time human remains were recovered.
Countries like Australia and Argentina have filed their own restitution requests for the return of ancestral remains, with a third of the 30, 000 specimens at Paris’s Musee de l’Homme being skulls and skeletons from around the world.
French President Emmanuel Macron addressed the Madagascan capital Antananarivo in April as a “bloody and tragic” colony of Madagascar, which proclaimed independence in 1960 after more than 60 years of colonial rule.
On Sunday, the skulls will be buried on an Indian Ocean island where they are scheduled to return.
Source: Aljazeera
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