13 The figures of the soldier slave and the concubine, common in the Sakalava kingdoms in the west, were unknown in Imerina. Soldiers were recruited from the free population.  
were put to work on farms. Around Maintirano, in a region of the west which remained independent, there were 'plantations of rice, maize, sorghum and bananas that were cultivated by thousands of Makoa slaves. You would walk for two days without coming across an inch of unfarmed land and without meeting a free man', according to the French traveller Douliot, writing in 1892. While in some parts of the west the Masombika were kept in bondage until the end of the nineteenth century, in the territories of the Kingdom of Madagascar, the Masombika emancipated in 1877 were considered to be subjects of the Queen and, as such, indentured to her. They nevertheless remained at the bottom of the social scale, and were subject to a degree of endogamy within their group. In Imerina, the prohibition of marital union between freemen and slaves continued to influence social relations long after the abolition of slavery. Through the interplay of marital alliances, it is possible that the descendants of East African slaves in the west enjoyed a greater degree of social mobility than in Imerina. In the independent kingdoms of the west, as elsewhere in East African societies (Médard, Derat, Vernet and Ballarin, 2013), emancipation was not a legal act, but rather a slow process of integration into a kinship group. However, this process involved forgetting the past and/or a denial of foreign and servile origins, causing the rupture of the bond between these descendants of slaves and their ancestors born on the continent.