The Balanta of Guinea-Bissau, numbering approximately 552,000 people, are Engaged yet Unreached. They are described as a people whose name means those who resist, having migrated westward from Mali between the 10th and 14th centuries to escape the Mandinka Kaabu Empire and later Portuguese enslavement, adopting tidal mangrove rice cultivation by the late 1600s They are an Indigenous people, with Balanta as their ethnic/kinship group and are in the Atlantic people cluster of the Sub-Saharan African Peoples. They mostly adhere to Animism and Balanta-Kentohe is their primary language.