Nzinga of Ndongo and Matamba

Nzinga, whose name is also written Njinga, was a queen of two neighbouring kingdoms in west-central Africa: Ndongo and Matamba, in the region that is now northern Angola. She was born around 1583 into the royal family of Ndongo and died in 1663 at about eighty years of age, after ruling for almost four decades.

She lived at a dangerous time. The Portuguese had arrived on the coast in 1575, founded the town of Luanda, and were pushing inland with soldiers, forts and slave traders. Much of Nzinga’s life was a struggle to stop them from taking over her people’s land. She did this in many ways: by negotiating, by fighting, by changing religion, by marrying for alliances and by moving her kingdom when she had to.

Today Nzinga is one of Africa’s most famous historical rulers. In Angola she is honoured as a symbol of resistance against colonialism. Historians also stress that she was a complex ruler of her time, who took part in the slave trade and used force against rivals, and they try to understand her without turning her into either a pure hero or a villain.

Nzinga’s father became king (ngola) of Ndongo when she was about ten. Her mother, Kengela ka Nkombe, was one of the king’s enslaved wives. Tradition says that Nzinga was born with the umbilical cord wrapped around her neck, and that her name comes from the Kimbundu verb kujinga, “to twist” or “to turn.” Children who survived difficult births were believed to have special spiritual gifts.

Because she was not expected to inherit the throne, her father could favour her without upsetting the male heirs. She trained as a warrior, learning to use the battle axe, the traditional weapon of Ndongo’s fighters. She also attended councils on law and war and important rituals. Portuguese missionaries taught her to read and write Portuguese, a skill that later made her a valuable diplomat.

She had a brother, Mbandi, who was the heir, and two sisters, Kambu and Funji, who later stood by her through war and captivity. These family relationships shaped her life deeply, in both loyalty and bitter rivalry.

Ndongo was a kingdom of the Mbundu people with its capital at Kabasa, a large town in the highlands. Its kings bore the title ngola, which the Portuguese used to name their colony “Angola.” To the north lay the powerful Christian Kingdom of Kongo, and to the east Matamba, a kingdom where women had sometimes ruled.

From 1575 the Portuguese, based at Luanda, fought a long series of wars against Ndongo. They burned villages, built forts inside Ndongo’s territory and captured very large numbers of people, many of whom were shipped across the Atlantic to Brazil and Spanish America as slaves. Ndongo won a major victory at the Battle of the Lukala in 1590, but it lost much land, and many local lords, called sobas, stopped paying tribute to the king.

In the early seventeenth century a new force appeared: the Imbangala, highly militarised warbands whose members were recruited by initiation rather than birth. They were feared for their ferocity, and the Portuguese hired some of them as mercenaries. In 1618 Portuguese and Imbangala forces sacked Ndongo’s capital. This was the crisis into which Nzinga stepped.

When her father died in 1617, her brother Mbandi became king. He killed rival claimants, and according to the sources he had Nzinga’s young son killed and Nzinga and her sisters forcibly sterilised. Nzinga seems to have left the court for a time. Yet in 1621, facing Portuguese pressure, Mbandi asked her to be his ambassador to the Portuguese governor, João Correia de Sousa, in Luanda. She agreed on condition that she could negotiate with full authority.

In Luanda she deliberately wore splendid Ndongo dress with feathers and jewels, not European clothing, to show that her culture was not inferior. The famous story of the chair belongs to this visit: finding only a mat for her while the Portuguese sat on chairs, she had an attendant kneel to form a seat so that she could speak to the governor as an equal. The story comes from later accounts and may have grown in the telling, but it captures the political meaning of the meeting.

Her negotiating position was firm. She offered peace, access for traders and the return of runaway slaves who had joined Ndongo’s army, but she insisted that the Portuguese remove their forts from Ndongo and refused to pay tribute, arguing that only conquered peoples paid tribute. To demonstrate goodwill she was publicly baptised, taking the name Ana de Sousa after her godparents, the governor and his wife. A treaty was agreed, and she returned to Kabasa in 1622.

The peace did not hold. The Portuguese failed to withdraw from their forts and continued to raid for captives, while Imbangala groups attacked Ndongo. Mbandi grew depressed and increasingly handed his duties to his sister.

Mbandi died in 1624 in unclear circumstances; some said suicide, others poison. Nzinga moved quickly to take power. Her supporters seized the royal ritual objects, she took the title ngola, and she eliminated opponents. The sources say she married the Imbangala chief who was guarding her young nephew, a rival heir, and then had the boy killed.

Her claim was fiercely contested. Some nobles argued that neither she nor her brother had a proper right to rule because their mothers were enslaved wives, and that a woman could not be ngola at all. The Portuguese exploited these divisions. They demanded that she become a vassal of Portugal and pay tribute, which she refused, and they encouraged sobas to switch allegiance. Nzinga in turn sent agents to persuade enslaved people on Portuguese-held lands to flee and join her.

In 1626 the Portuguese declared war and recognised a rival, first Hari a Kiluanje and then Ngola Hari, as king of Ndongo. Nzinga’s forces were defeated in a series of battles. Her offer in 1627 to become a Portuguese vassal in return for recognition was rejected, and her ambassador was executed. In an ambush her two sisters were captured. By late 1628 she had only a small force left and had been driven from her kingdom.

In exile Nzinga made a surprising choice. The Imbangala leader Kasanje, formerly an enemy, offered an alliance. She accepted, married him and was initiated into Imbangala society, adopting many of its rites and its military organisation while keeping her Mbundu identity. The historian Linda Heywood has argued that her genius lay in combining Mbundu royal traditions with the Imbangala military system to create a new and effective army. She welcomed runaway slaves and exiled Ndongans, rewarding them with freedom, land and titles.

European sources describe Imbangala initiation as involving extreme rituals, including infanticide and cannibalism, and some claim that Nzinga took part. These accounts come largely from outsiders who were hostile or had their own agendas, and historians disagree about how literally to read them. What is clear is that joining the Imbangala gave Nzinga a powerful, merit-based military community that did not depend on the lineage arguments used against her in Ndongo.

Between 1631 and 1635 she invaded the neighbouring Kingdom of Matamba, captured its queen, Mwongo Matamba, and made Matamba her base. Because Matamba had a tradition of female rulers, it gave her a more secure foundation than Ndongo. She settled her followers there and used the region’s position on trade routes to the interior to gain control of the slave trade, using the profits to fund her wars.

During these war years she adopted the role of a male ruler, taking masculine titles and dress, keeping a female bodyguard and requiring her male concubines to dress as women. Historians interpret this as a deliberate political strategy in a society where rulership was associated with men.

In August 1641 a fleet of the Dutch West India Company, allied with the Kingdom of Kongo, captured Luanda, and the Portuguese retreated inland to their fort at Massangano. Nzinga immediately sent envoys to the Dutch and formed an alliance, offering them trade, including in slaves. Dutch envoys and soldiers came to her court. She moved her capital west to Kavanga and built a huge war camp that, including non-combatants, reportedly numbered some 80,000 people.

Between 1641 and 1644 she recovered large parts of Ndongo. She defeated the Portuguese at the Battle of Ngoleme in 1644 but was defeated at Kavanga in 1646, where her archives and her sister Kambu were captured. The documents revealed that her other captive sister, Funji, had been secretly sending her information, and the Portuguese reportedly drowned Funji in the Kwanza River. In 1647, with Dutch reinforcements, Nzinga won a major victory at the Battle of Kombi and besieged Massangano.

She could not take the fortress, however, because she lacked artillery. In August 1648 a Portuguese expedition from Brazil under Salvador Correia de Sá recaptured Luanda, and the Dutch agreed to leave Angola. Nzinga withdrew to Matamba. From then on she concentrated on defending Matamba and preventing Portuguese expansion inland rather than reconquering Ndongo.

In the 1640s and 1650s Nzinga turned increasingly toward Christianity. Italian and Spanish Capuchin missionaries, who were less tied to the Portuguese colonial government than earlier Jesuits and parish priests, came to her court; one, Calisto Zelotes, became her secretary. She used them as intermediaries with Rome and in 1661 received a letter from Pope Alexander VII. She built churches and placed crosses in her court. She also suppressed opponents of her religious policy, and some traditional priests were sold to the Portuguese as slaves.

Exhausted by decades of war, Nzinga and the Portuguese negotiated through the early 1650s and signed a peace treaty in 1656. The Lucala River became the border between Portuguese Angola and Matamba, Portuguese traders were allowed into Matamba, and a slave market was concentrated at her capital, effectively giving her a monopoly. Missionaries could reside in her kingdom. A clause requiring tribute was proposed but never ratified. Her sister Kambu, known as Dona Barbara, was released and returned to her.

In her last years Nzinga worked to rebuild Matamba and secure the succession. She resettled freed people, allowed women in the war camp to bear children, which Imbangala custom had forbidden, reformed laws, abolished concubinage and married her favourite partner in a Christian ceremony. She named Kambu as her heir. Nzinga died on 17 December 1663 and was buried with both Catholic and Mbundu rites. Kambu succeeded her, and in the century after her death queens ruled Matamba for much of the time.

Oral traditions celebrating Nzinga began soon after her death. Matamba eventually became part of Portuguese Angola in the nineteenth century, but her memory survived. During the Angolan War of Independence (1961–1974) she became a powerful symbol of resistance, and she has remained a national heroine since independence. A statue of her was erected in Kinaxixi Square in Luanda in 2002, a major street is named after her, and the National Bank of Angola issued a coin in her honour in 2014.

Her image has travelled across the Atlantic world too. Writers of the African diaspora, such as the Afro-Cuban poet Georgina Herrera, have claimed her as an ancestor figure; the historian John Thornton has argued that her reputation helped shape a wider Atlantic Creole culture. She has appeared in films, including the Angolan film Njinga: Queen of Angola (2013), in documentary dramas and in video games. Local tradition also identifies footprints in the Black Rocks at Pungo Andongo, in Malanje Province, as hers.

European portrayals were very different. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writers, drawing on hostile or embellished accounts, focused on stories of cruelty, sexuality and cannibalism; the Marquis de Sade and G. W. F. Hegel both used her, directly or indirectly, as an example of disorder. Twentieth-century scholarship, spurred partly by Angolan independence, took a more careful approach.

Nzinga is one of the best-documented African rulers of the early modern period, but almost all the documentation was produced by outsiders or through them. The richest material includes about a dozen of her own letters, most published in António Brásio’s Monumenta Missionaria Africana; the correspondence of governor Fernão de Sousa, who served from 1624 to 1631 and described her early reign in detail (edited by Beatrix Heintze); the chronicle of António de Oliveira de Cadornega (1680–1681); and the works of two Italian Capuchins who lived at her court from 1658, Antonio Gaeta da Napoli and Giovanni Antonio Cavazzi da Montecuccolo.

Each has its biases. Portuguese officials wrote to justify policy and war. Gaeta’s biography (1669) celebrates her conversion as a triumph of providence and compares her to heroines of antiquity. Cavazzi, who presided at her funeral, praised her political skill but also described her as a ruler who had ruined the land, and made pejorative claims, such as about cannibalism, without offering evidence. His work, freely adapted into French by Jean-Baptiste Labat in 1732, became the main source for later European images of Nzinga, magnifying sensational elements.

Popular stories, such as the claim that she executed lovers after one night, rest on even weaker ground; one comes from Olfert Dapper’s seventeenth-century compilation and has no independent support. The famous chair episode, although widely believed, is also known through later narrative sources. Historians therefore read the documents against the grain, compare them with Mbundu oral traditions and with patterns in Central African political culture, and treat claims about ritual violence with particular care.

Modern scholarship has offered several frames. Joseph C. Miller’s 1975 article in The Journal of African History highlighted her political innovations but also criticised her autocratic methods, reading her career in terms of competition among Mbundu political institutions. John Thornton, in a 1991 article on “Legitimacy and Political Power,” emphasised her long struggle to establish legitimacy as a woman and as the child of an enslaved mother, showing how she drew on Ndongo precedents, Imbangala institutions and Christian kingship as they suited her. Linda Heywood’s 2017 biography, Njinga of Angola: Africa’s Warrior Queen, portrays her as a great political strategist and cautions against casting her as either a populist hero or a tyrant.

Gender is central to these debates. Nzinga did not overturn the idea that rulers of Ndongo should be male during her lifetime; instead she adopted male roles and titles when useful and later reshaped her court in a more feminine, Christian style. Yet her success changed precedent: in the century after her death, queens ruled Matamba for at least eighty of the following 104 years. Feminist writers have praised her challenge to patriarchy while noting that she ruled as an elite over others.

The hardest question is the slave trade. Nzinga fought Portuguese conquest and at times encouraged enslaved people to escape from Portuguese plantations. At the same time she captured, bought and sold people, supplied the Dutch with thousands of captives a year and negotiated control of the slave market in the 1656 treaty. Historians see no contradiction in terms of seventeenth-century politics: control of the trade was a source of revenue and power that every regional state sought. But for modern readers, remembering Nzinga as a symbol of freedom requires facing this part of her record honestly, alongside her real achievement of preserving an independent African kingdom against a European empire.