It is a quiet object to command such a grand room. Housed in a ceremonial case, resting in the hushed, climate-controlled air of the French Ministry of Culture in Paris, it is a piece of bone, ancient and anonymous to the casual eye. But it has a name: Toera. And it once belonged to a king.
This is not an artefact. It is a man. Its return to Madagascar, more than a century after it was taken as a trophy of colonial conquest, is an act of profound and unsettling power. On 26 August 2025, France formally handed over the skull of King Toera, a monarch of the Menabe kingdom, along with the remains of two other individuals from the Sakalava ethnic group. They had been held at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris for 128 years. The restitution of these remains – not simply as museum objects, but as a sovereign and his people – forces a confrontation with the most brutal truths of the colonial project: its power to transform a sacred human being into a scientific specimen, a king into an object.
In recent years, the conversation around the restitution of Culture and heritage has gained a powerful momentum. Museums across Europe have begun the slow, often reluctant process of reckoning with the contents of their collections, acknowledging that much of what they hold was acquired through violence and plunder. But the return of a skull is a fundamentally different transaction. To return a statue, a mask, or a throne is to return a piece of cultural expression. To return a human head is to return a history of violence. It is an admission not just of theft, but of desecration.
A Kingdom Shattered
Before he was a skull in a collection at France’s National Museum of Natural History, King Toera was the leader of the Sakalava people in western Madagascar. His was an ancient lineage, a kingdom with its own traditions, its own spiritual world, and its own profound sense of place. In the late 19th century, that world was shattered by the arrival of French colonial forces.
The conquest of Madagascar was not a simple administrative takeover; it was a violent subjugation. Toera led a fierce resistance. He fought for the sovereignty of his people and the integrity of his land. In August 1897, during a military campaign to establish absolute colonial control over the island, the French response was not to imprison or exile the king. It was to execute him. Toera, along with members of his retinue and military leaders, was killed and decapitated by French troops.
Their beheading was an act of symbolic warfare, a display of power designed to terrorise and to break the will of a people. It was a declaration that the old kings were dead, their authority literally severed. The taking of their skulls was the final, clinical act in this process. It was the moment the violence of the sword was succeeded by the intellectual violence of anthropology. The heads of the resistance were no longer relics of a defeated monarchy to be respected; they were data points, physical evidence to be studied, catalogued, and stored in a drawer. They were claimed as the ultimate colonial “trophy.”
The Anatomy of a Trophy
Perhaps the most insidious aspect of the colonial enterprise was this power of re-definition. A living Art and culture, with all its fluid, contradictory, and spiritual complexities, could be captured, killed, and pinned to a board like a butterfly. Its most sacred objects could be re-labelled as ethnographic artefacts. Its leaders could be reduced to their craniometry.
King Toera, in death, underwent this final, terrible transformation. He ceased to be an ancestor, a sovereign, a symbol of defiance. He became an object of study, another piece in the vast, obsessive 19th-century project of classifying and ranking the peoples of the world. The National Museum of Natural History in Paris became his tomb, but it was a tomb devoid of reverence, context, or dignity.
For the museum, the skull was an acquisition. For the Sakalava people, it was an open wound. The descendants of King Toera had been requesting the return of the remains for over 20 years. As Malagasy authorities stated, the absence of these remains has been felt deeply for over a century. They are not mere objects in a collection, but the invisible and indelible link between the past and the present. An unburied king, his head held captive on another continent, is a powerful symbol of an incomplete history, of a ghost that cannot be put to rest. His absence was a constant, silent reminder of the foundational violence of the colonial state.
The Mechanism of Return
The ceremony in Paris, then, was more than a diplomatic nicety. It was the beginning of a reversal of that colonial process. The event marked a critical legal milestone: it was the first restitution to be carried out under a 2023 French framework law that facilitates the repatriation of human remains from public collections. Previously, such returns required individual, ad-hoc acts of parliament – a cumbersome and heavily politicised process that stalled many legitimate claims. The new legal framework acknowledges that human remains hold a status distinct from other museum objects, bypassing the rigid principle of the “inalienability” of state collections when it comes to the bodies of the colonised.
Yet the path to restitution is rarely straightforward. The identification of Toera’s skull highlights the complex intersection of Western science and Indigenous knowledge. While scientific DNA testing was attempted, the results were ultimately inconclusive. It was not a laboratory that provided the final confirmation, but a joint bilateral scientific committee working alongside a traditional Sakalava intermediary. This collaboration represents a crucial shift in curatorial practice. By relying on a traditional intermediary to help confirm the identity of the king’s skull, the process validated Malagasy spiritual and cultural authority over their own ancestors, subverting the very scientific paradigms that had claimed Toera as a specimen in the first place.
A Body Restored
Following the formal handover at the French Ministry of Culture, the remains were flown to Antananarivo, Madagascar. There, they were received in a solemn ceremony at the Mausoleum of Avaratr’Ambohitsaina. Malagasy authorities and descendants hailed the repatriation as a “historic” moment and an “immensely significant gesture” in addressing the legacy of colonial violence.
But the final stage of this journey takes place far from the capital. The remains were subsequently transported for reburial in Menabe, the historic heartland of the Sakalava kingdom in the west of the island. There, the skulls of King Toera and his compatriots will finally be laid to rest according to the customs of their people.
This is the act that completes the circle. The reburial is not just a funeral; it is an act of restoration. It restores the king to his land, his body to his people, and his story to its rightful context. It is a profound rejection of the museum’s claim to ownership.
This is why the restitution of human remains carries a charge that the return of artefacts can never quite match. An object can be owned, but a body is sovereign. The return of King Toera’s head is a recognition of that sovereignty. It is an acknowledgment that a person can never be reduced to a thing, that a name is more powerful than a catalogue number, and that some wounds cannot be healed, but can, with time, courage, and a profound act of respect, finally be tended to. The king is no longer a data point in a drawer. He is going home to be buried. And in that simple, final act, a small measure of a broken world is made whole.
