France returns the skull of monarch killed in colonial times

The chief of a Malagasy king killed by French troops during a war of the colonial era was officially returned to Madagascar.

The transfer of the head of King Toera – and those of two other members of his court – took place during a ceremony at the Ministry of Culture in Paris.

The skulls had been brought to France at the end of the 19th century and stored at the Museum of Natural History in the French capital.

This is the first use of a new law intended to accelerate the return of human remains of the collections to France.

“These skulls have entered the national collections in circumstances which have clearly violated human dignity and in a context of colonial violence,” said French Minister of French Rachida Dati quoted by the AFP agency during the ceremony.

In August 1897, a French force sent to assert colonial control of the Menabé kingdom of the Sakalava people in western Madagascar massacred a local army.

King Toera was killed and beheaded: her head sent to Paris where she was placed in the archives of the Museum of Natural History.

Almost 130 years later, the pressure of the king’s descendants and the government of the Indian Ocean nation paved the way for the return of the skull.

The Minister of Culture of Madagascar, the Volamilente, Donna Mara, who also delivered a speech to the transmission, said that their return was an “important gesture,” reports AFP.

“Their absence has been, for more than a century … An open injury in the heart of our island,” she said.

This is not the first time that the human remains of the colonial era have been rendered by France.

The most famous was the South African woman cruelly nicknamed the “Hottentot Venus” which had already been exhibited in Europe and whose body was brought home in 2012.

But it is the first return under recent law that makes the process much easier.

It is estimated that at the Museum of Natural History, there are more than 20,000 human remains brought in France from around the world for so-called scientific reasons.