from Mozambique to Madagascar between 1820 and 1890. This historian has worked partly on the basis of data produced by British officers, in an abolitionist context. These figures probably require some downward adjustment. ${ }^{4}$ Given its clandestine nature, it is difficult to estimate the volume of slave trading imports with any accuracy. However, it may be estimated that the numbers concerned were considerable, involving up to several hundred thousand individuals. A proportion of East African captives (possibly 20 per cent) were only in transit on the Great Island; they were re-exported elsewhere. In practice, due to its partial escape from Antananarivo rule, the western coast of Madagascar played a key role in relaying slaves across the western Indian Ocean, feeding both the French markets for 'engaged labour' and the Malagasy slave markets (Boyer-Rossol, 2015). With the gradual decline of re-exportation to the French plantation islands of La Réunion and Nosy Be, and a decrease of imports to the Kingdom of Madagascar, East African captives were progressively retained on the west coast of Madagascar and enslaved locally. In the region around Maintirano, the illegal slave trade continued well beyond 1877 and the Makoa were kept in bondage until at least 1896, the year slavery was abolished in Madagascar. This emancipation involved approximately half a million individuals, out of an approximate population of 2.5 million on the entire island (Grandier, 1956). This figure, produced in a colonial context, may well require upward adjustment (Rakoto, 2014). It relates to the populations of territories formerly under Antananarivo rule, and consequently does not include the Masombika who were liberated in the Kingdom of Madagascar in 1877, nor persons who remained in servitude at the end of the nineteenth century in those regions which remained independent, particularly in the west. Accordingly, during the second half of the nineteenth century