France Returns Looted Skulls to Madagascar After 128 Years

France has finally handed back three human skulls looted during its colonial conquest of Madagascar, including one believed to be that of King Toera, a monarch beheaded by French troops in 1897.

The remains, taken as trophies during one of the bloodiest chapters of colonisation, were returned in a solemn ceremony at the French Ministry of Culture in Paris on Tuesday.

“These skulls entered the national collections in circumstances that clearly violated human dignity and in a context of colonial violence,” France’s Culture Minister Rachida Dati said during the event.

The Madagascan Culture Minister, Volamiranty Donna Mara, called the return deeply symbolic, describing the century-long absence as “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 added.

Video from the ceremony showed three boxes draped in traditional cloth being carried in procession through the ornate halls of the ministry, marking what officials said was the first restitution of human remains since France passed a new law in 2023 enabling such returns.

The skulls, confirmed by experts to be of the Sakalava people, will be flown back to Madagascar on Sunday. They will be reburied in a tribute timed to coincide with the anniversary of King Toera’s execution in August 1897.

The move comes after French President Emmanuel Macron’s April visit to Antananarivo, where he spoke of seeking “forgiveness” for the “bloody and tragic” colonial rule that ended only in 1960.

But restitution remains an unfinished process. With one-third of Paris’s Musée de l’Homme collection made up of skulls and skeletons from around the world, countries including Australia and Argentina have already filed requests for their ancestral remains. For many, Madagascar’s gain is just the start of a reckoning long overdue.