Sihanaka

The Sihanaka are a Malagasy people of the marshlands around Lake Alaotra in central-northeastern Madagascar; their name means people of the swamps. Oral history traces them either to settlers left in the Alaotra region by Merina ancestors or to groups that later left Imerina to escape royal rule.

By the mid-seventeenth century they had grown wealthy trading rice, zebu and slaves on the route between the Merina capital at Antananarivo and Toamasina. Around 1700 attacks by Betsimisaraka forces helped by French militiamen failed, repelled by firearms bought from the Sakalava and by tropical disease.

In the eighteenth century they became vassals of the Boina Kingdom, and around 1800 the armies of Andrianampoinimerina conquered them for the Kingdom of Imerina. Merina colonists then settled among them, and the slave trade was ended under Radama I in the 1810s.