Manjak

The Manjak, also called Manjaco or Manjaku, are a West Atlantic people of the mangrove coast of northern Guinea-Bissau, concentrated in the Bassarel and Babok lands around Cacheu. They speak a language of the Bak group and built the bolanhas: networks of dikes and drainage canals that turn mangrove swamp into flooded rice paddies, admired by early Portuguese visitors.

Their villages were held in a semi-feudal order of landowners and chiefs owing rice tribute to the king of Bassarel, who presided over a loose federation of neighbouring districts.

Portuguese mariners made contact in the late 1400s and built a trading post at Cacheu, but for centuries its commanders paid tribute to Manjak rulers, whose rice lands and palm-oil groves kept them autonomous long after the coast had been drawn into the Atlantic trade.