By Enyichukwu Enemanna
France has repatriated the head of Malagasy king killed by its troops during an 1897 colonial-era war in Madagascar, marking the first use of a new law meant to fastract the return of human remains from collections in France.
King Toera was killed, decapitated and his head sent to the capital of France, Paris where it was placed in the archives of the Museum of Natural History.
French soldiers deployed to assert colonial control over the Menabé kingdom of the Sakalava people in western Madagascar massacred a local army in August that same year, when King Toera was also killed.
The official handover of his skull and those of two other members of his court took place at a ceremony on Monday at the culture ministry in Paris.
“These skulls entered the national collections in circumstances that clearly violated human dignity and in a context of colonial violence,” AFP quoted the French Culture Minister Rachida Dati as saying during the ceremony.
Descendants of the king nearly 130 years later rose up to mount pressure for his remains to be returned to the Indian Ocean country.
Madagascar’s Culture Minister, Volamiranty Donna Mara, who also spoke at the handover ceremony said their return was a “significant gesture”.
“Their absence has been, for more than a century… an open wound in the heart of our island,” she said.
This is not the first time France was returning parts of human body arising from the colonial era war. It has earlier returned remains of a South African woman cruelly nicknamed the “Hottentot Venus”.
Once put on display in Europe, her body was taken home in 2012.
Under a recent law which makes the process much easier however, the return of King Toera is the first time.
It is alleged that over 20,000 human remains are deposited at the Museum of Natural History, gathered from around the world for supposedly scientific purposes.
