The skulls of King Toera and two Sakalava warriors, killed in 1897 and 1898 respectively during France’s conquest of Madagascar, are due to return to the land of their forebears this August. This return will mark the end of a long process that began in 2003. President Emmanuel Macron had in fact himself originally planned to take part in a ceremony to commemorate this homecoming during his official visit to the independent Indian Ocean island last week, and to mark the “pacification of memories” it is meant to bring about.
But for the time being restitutions such as this one appear to be confined just to human remains from foreign nations, and not those that come from France's overseas territories such as La Réunion, which lies to the east of Madagascar. The issue is one of law. Under recent legislation human remains held by French metropolitan museums can be returned to foreign countries at their request. But that new law does not cover requests from French overseas territories which are themselves part of France, such as La Réunion; in effect, the French state cannot restore something to itself.
This has led to deep frustration in the country's far-flung départements and regions. “The people of La Réunion need to recover a sense of pride,” says Ghislaine Mithra-Bessière, president of the Rasine Kaf association, which has joined with some forty other groups on the island to call for the return of skulls of enslaved Réunionnais men and women that were “collected” and subsequently kept at the Musée de l’Homme in Paris.
“Several heads and busts of enslaved people were taken in 1840 from the colonial hospital of Saint-Denis de Bourbon, and were acquired decades later, in the form of skulls and castings, by the Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris. Now held in storage at the Musée de l’Homme in Paris, these skulls and busts of enslaved people from Réunion have been sorted into various collections of human remains, based on the supposed or actual origins of these individuals, sometimes linked to Madagascar, at other times to Mozambique, so that their overseas provenance had to a large extent gone unnoticed,” explains Klara Boyer-Rossol, an expert on the slave trade and slavery in the western Indian Ocean at the Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies (BCDSS) at the University of Bonn, and a member of the Centre International de Recherche sur les Esclavages et Post-esclavages (CIRESC) based in the northern suburbs of Paris.
“During the abolitionist nineteenth century, when ethnography was gaining ground on both sides of the Atlantic,” the researcher writes in a special issue she has co-edited for the academic journal Esclavages & post-esclavages, “the fields of medicine and 'racial' science led to the systematic exploitation of corpses, skulls and bones, especially those of people described as ‘black’ and/or ‘enslaved’.”
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“We're calling for the return of the human remains of our deported forebears and the creation of a museum of slavery,” says Ghislaine Mithra-Bessière. Such a museum would bring together information on slavery, marronage - the process of escaping from slavery - and indentured servitude. “This is a matter of urgency! We're entitled to our own history and have a duty to remember! The people of Réunion have a duty to give these forebears a place of honour,” she says.
For the time being, these ancestral remains from Réunion are still in storage at the Musée de l’Homme: the overriding principle continues to be that public collections of such items cannot be broken up. For the law passed in December 2023 that does provide for the return of human remains from France to foreign nations makes no provision for extending such restitution to the country's own overseas territories.
“At the time they took our forebears from us, we were colonies,” explains Frédéric Maillot, a Member of Parliament for La Réunion and member of the leftwing Gauche démocrate et républicaine (GDR) parliamentary group. “It's now possible to carry out returns from one state to another, but the [French] state cannot return something to itself. That's why we're urgently calling for a framework law specific to the overseas territories.” Of the eighteen thousand human remains held by the Musée de l’Homme, several hundred could have come from France’s overseas territories. There is a deep lack of knowledge about the provenance of these remains, with barely a handful of researchers having taken on the task of checking them in the past fifteen years.
The Musée de l’Homme told Mediapart that, in addition to the casts and bones from Réunion, its collections department has identified “five human remains and four plaster busts linked to Guadeloupe, and seven human remains and one bust linked to Martinique […] pending ongoing research which may uncover errors in their classification under the wrong geographical area”.
France confronts its colonial past
And that analysis does not even include the human remains of individuals from the Kali’na people of French Guiana from whom six skulls and two busts were moulded post mortem. The Guyanese association Moliko Alet+Po is calling for these remains to be returned to their ancestral lands. “Every day counts,” says Corinne Toka Devilliers from the association, which has been campaigning for many years for the return of these individuals who were once exhibited at the Jardin d’Acclimatation in Paris as part of a human zoo. “Last September, we came with descendants and traditional leaders to formally request the restitution. We held a shamanic ceremony at the Musée de l’Homme. It was a very powerful moment, faced with those six skeletons in their cardboard boxes. It created a certain pressure.”
MP Christophe Marion, who is from the Macron-supporting Ensemble pour la République (EPR) political group, has drawn up a report on the issue and, at the beginning of this year, tabled a bill that now specifically targets France’s overseas territories. “We're nearly there,” says Corinne Toka Devilliers, hopefully. “By 2026, our ancestors could be back in French Guiana.” The MP’s bill seeks to fill the legal void preventing the return of human remains to France's own overseas territories.
The problem is that although the proposal has cross-party backing, it does not enjoy complete support. “What troubles us,” says MP Frédéric Maillot, “is that these remains are described as not being able to be the object of victim claims. That wording is, at best, clumsy. It’s outrageous and heartbreaking to be told not to act like victims over this. Do we need to remind people that slavery is a crime against humanity?” he asks.
Contacted by Mediapart, Senator Catherine Morin-Desailly, from the centrist Union Centriste (UC) parliamentary group, who was the author of the 2023 law, notes that “some human remains simply have no place in [these] collections. It's only right they return to their homelands to be treated with dignity, not as museum pieces, which is why the law speaks of ‘restitution for funeral purposes’.” One of the legal conditions is that the remains cannot simply be transferred from one collection to another one somewhere else. “It can be for a memorial, a burial or a cremation,” the senator adds, “but always with the respect due to the dead. In line with the customs of the communities concerned, they are free to decide.”
A long-standing advocate for the return of human remains to their original communities, the senator expresses confidence that a legislative solution for all those making such requests would soon be in place. Still, even with amendments, there is no guarantee the bill will found the necessary parliamentary time at the National Assembly in Paris. “There are countless cross-party bills waiting to be examined,” confided one parliamentary source.
But this is a highly-sensitive subject that touches on how France views its past relations with its overseas territories and its colonial history. These museum collections, which contain thousands of human remains, are in reality a Pandora’s Box: yesterday it was French Guiana, today it is Réunion, and tomorrow it will be Guadeloupe and Martinique in the Caribbean. Indeed, all of France's overseas territories and peoples are concerned by this issue.
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- The original French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Michael Streeter