Mwalimu-G
Elder Lister
Queens of Infamy: Njinga
The Portuguese colonizers of West Central Africa learned it the hard way: you mess with the Queen of Ndongo and Matamba at your own peril.
Illustration by Louise Pomeroy
This story was funded by Longreads Members
Join and help support great storytelling
Anne Thériault | Longreads | October 2019 | 23 minutes (5,741 words)
From the notorious to the half-forgotten, Queens of Infamy, a Longreads series by Anne Thériault, focuses on world-historical women of centuries past.
* * *
The kingdom of Ndongo was an early-modern African state located in present-day Angola, and, at the time of Njinga’s birth, a rancid combination of white people, colonialism, and the Atlantic slave trade were tearing it apart. The Portuguese had shown up in Ndongo in the late 15th century and had quickly realized that they could exploit the rich coastal lands for the glory (read: financial gain) of their empire. Of course, they claimed to be doing it in the name of bringing Jesus to the locals and saving their souls, but their definition of salvation included the transportation of millions of people across the Atlantic, where they forced them to work in brutal, degrading, and deadly conditions. The first direct slave voyage from Africa to the Americas happened by the early 1520s; by the time the first ship carrying enslaved Africans arrived in North America in 1619, the Atlantic slave trade was already in full swing in South America. The enormous scale of the operation is hard to wrap one’s mind around; tens of thousands of enslaved people were sent from Angola to Brazil between 1575 and 1595, a number that would climb into the millions before the practice was abolished in Portugal a few centuries later.
Because this type of discussion always generates some version of “but the Africans also enslaved each other,” allow me just to state up front that, yes, the people of Ndongo had a system of free and unfree individuals. People who were unfree fell into two categories: kijikos, similar to the serfs that had existed in Western Europe before the socio-economic upheaval of the Black Death, and mubikas, enslaved people who could be sold as property, most of whom had been captured in battles with other kingdoms. Of course any theft of human freedom is horrific, and the complexities of pre-colonial slavery in what would later become Angola are worth discussing within their own context. There is still a vast, vast difference between the system that existed before colonization and the operation the Portuguese created. Any comparison between the two in the year of our lord 2019 is made in bad faith.
The Portuguese presence in West Central Africa was limited at first to their trading posts and missions, but in 1571, Sebastian of Portugal — a pouty blond with firm calves — ordered the conquest and subjugation of all of Ndongo. All in Jesus’s name, no doubt. By the time Njinga’s father became king in 1593, her country had been at war for over a decade.
Much of Njinga’s legacy in the West has been rooted in racist, sexist propaganda created by white people; it’s only recently that a more accurate depiction of her life has begun to gain traction outside of her homeland. The credit for this shift goes to scholars like Linda M. Heywood, who have meticulously stitched together academic sources, contemporary documents, and details passed down through oral traditions to create a fully fleshed-out portrait of Njinga and her accomplishments. Heywood’s book Njinga of Angola is considered to be one of the most authoritative biographies of the queen and is the source for most of the facts in this piece.
* * *
Njinga was her father’s clear favorite throughout her childhood. She was 10 when Mbande became the ngola, or king, of Ngondo (“Angola” comes from the Portuguese misunderstanding the meaning of ngola and thinking it was the name of the kingdom). He often involved her in his official duties: she attended many of the legal councils that her father oversaw, received military training, and participated in the ritual activities that were so vital to their culture. The fact that she was a girl and not even the child of his principal wife made all of this very unusual, but then again maybe this explains why Mbande a Ngola felt comfortable to display his preference so publicly. It would have been unheard of to lavish that kind of individual attention on any of his sons; to do so meant risking jealousy not only among them, but also among their mothers, many of whom came from powerful families. A daughter, though, was different — for one thing, no one really viewed her as direct competition. Besides, everyone agreed that Njinga was special. She outperformed her brothers in every capacity, including with the battle axe, which was the royal weapon of choice.
NJINGA: boys!
NJINGA: they’re such simple creatures
NJINGA: so thirsty for their father’s affections
NJINGA: so easy to humiliate
NJINGA: it’s like shooting fish in a barrel, if all the fish also had serious daddy issues
Even as Njinga was living large and serving up slices of emasculation pie to her brothers, Ndongo was deeply embroiled in conflict. The Imbangala, a militarized nomadic society of young people living in war camps, had long been harassing Ndongo on their own; now they joined up with the Portuguese. The Imbangala wanted the Ndongo territory, and the Portuguese wanted to destabilize the kingdom and enslave the refugees created by the Imbangala invasion. It was a powerful alliance, and one that Njinga’s father struggled to counter with the men or arms at his disposal.
The king tried everything — open warfare, diplomacy, negotiation — but the forces he was facing were implacable. To make matters worse, many regional Ndongo leaders began defecting to the Portuguese once they saw which way the tide was turning. This shocking betrayal gutted Mbande a Ngola. Not only had those regional leaders been contributing manpower to the fight, their annual tributes to the king had underpinned the financial and administrative cohesion of Ndongo. With these tributes going to the Portuguese instead, the kingdom began to crumble in earnest. By the time his own men ambushed and murdered Mbande a Ngola in 1617, he held just a fraction of the territory his father had passed on to him. What was left of Ndongo soon fell into a succession crisis.
First, Ngola Mbande murdered Njinga’s newborn son, her first and only child. Next, he purportedly ordered the sterilization of Njinga and their sisters, Kambu and Funji, with herbs and boiling oils. Satisfied that none of his full-blood siblings would be able to produce a male heir, he let them live.
NJINGA: obviously I’m glad I wasn’t killed
NJINGA: but, objectively, it wasn’t a very smart move on his part
NJINGA: a lot of assumptions going on there
NJINGA: that women aren’t a threat unless they have sons
NJINGA: that they won’t seek revenge
NJINGA: just a whole lot of assumptions
Ngola Mbande may have thought he was playing the long game, but Njinga was on a different level entirely. Her game was a universe unto itself, expanding ever outwards and snickering cosmically at anything that might cross its path.
* * *
Njinga plotted and bided for so long that eventually Ngola Mbande just assumed things were cool between them again. That time he murdered her only child? Water under the bridge, probably! Women get so emotional about these things but you’ve just got to give them time to calm down. Things in fact seemed so chill to the king that he decided to turn to his sister for help. You know how it is when you’ve poured boiling oil on a person’s reproductive organs but then, haha oh man awkward, you need to ask them to do you a solid.
By 1621, Ngola Mbande’s rule was in a precarious position. The Portuguese were pressuring him on all sides, with increased violence, an expansion in the Atlantic slave trade, and the kidnapping of several highly-placed members of the royal family. Njinga was 39 years old at this point, estranged from her brother and living to the east of Ndongo in the kingdom of Matamba; in the years since her brother’s attack, she had spent her time honing her reputation for leadership both on and off the battlefield. When a new governor of Portuguese Angola was appointed, the king sensed that the moment for negotiating was ripe, and asked his sister to be his ambassador to the Portuguese Angolan capital of Luanda. Njinga, amazingly, did not immediately respond with FUCK YOU FOR KILLING MY KID, but instead agreed. In early 1622, she entered Luanda with an impressive retinue. It must have seemed like she’d been training for this moment her whole life. After all those years of learning at her father’s feet, of honing her skills, of pushing through her degradation and pain, she was finally going to show the Portuguese that the Ndongo people were a force to be reckoned with. The fact that she would also publicly humiliate her brother by outshining him once again was just icing on the cake.
She flattered the Portuguese and acceded to many of their requests, promising them that her brother would cease military operations if they did the same. The only issue on which she remained unbending was the governor’s demand that Ngola Mbande pay an annual tribute to the Portuguese king. This, she said, would have been fair if they were a conquered state, but her brother was not a vassal. He was a sovereign king negotiating with an equal. When the governor expressed suspicion at the idea that Ngola Mbande actually wanted peace, Njinga played her trump card: if the Portuguese agreed to her brother’s terms, she would agree to study the Christian catechism and to be baptized. After all, hadn’t the Portuguese invaded Africa in order to save souls? And here was a royal soul fresh for the picking. Were the Portuguese implying that her soul was worth less than an earthly tribute? Caught in a Jesus snare of their own making, the Portuguese didn’t have much choice but to agree to Njinga’s conditions.
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Njinga seemed to embrace her new religion, studying its rituals with enthusiasm. She took the baptismal name Ana de Sousa after her godparents, Ana da Silva (whose family she stayed with during the negotiations) and Governor de Sousa. The government officials came to greatly respect Njinga, and she later said that this was a time of great happiness in her life. It was also a diplomatic success; by the time she left Luanda, Njinga had secured a promise for a peace treaty.
* * *
In spite of Njinga’s ingenious politicking, the promise of peace did not last. An alliance that Ngola Mbande had made with the Imbangala collapsed and the Ndongo court was driven out of their capital of Kabasa. The Portuguese wouldn’t put the treaty into action while the king was in exile and unbaptized, and Njinga, in turn, was pressuring her brother into refusing the latter of these terms. In the wake of his sister’s success in Luanda, Ngola Mbande had come to rely heavily on her counsel. Now he listened attentively as she swore that it would be humiliating for the King of Ndongo to submit to a foreign power, and would amount to a betrayal of their customs. A conversion, Njinga said, would cause all of his supporters to abandon him. If this seems a little much coming from the person who had just gone through a strategic baptism, it might be worth considering Njinga’s private desire to undermine her brother. Of course, every word she said was completely true! But also: she had a slow revenge to wreak.
NJINGA: the Portuguese betrayed us in the end
NJINGA: in case you haven’t quite caught the theme of colonialism yet
NJINGA: as it turns out, their promises are worth less than shit
NJINGA: shit is useful for fertilizing, at least
NJINGA: anyway, my brother died by poisoning two years after my trip to Luanda, a broken man
NJINGA: some said the poison was self-administered
NJINGA: some said that I did it
NJINGA: but, truly, secret killings are not my style at all
More here...
The Portuguese colonizers of West Central Africa learned it the hard way: you mess with the Queen of Ndongo and Matamba at your own peril.
Illustration by Louise Pomeroy
This story was funded by Longreads Members
Join and help support great storytelling
Anne Thériault | Longreads | October 2019 | 23 minutes (5,741 words)
From the notorious to the half-forgotten, Queens of Infamy, a Longreads series by Anne Thériault, focuses on world-historical women of centuries past.
* * *
Late into the 16th century, Kengela ka Nkombe gave birth to her second child. Her first had been a son, and she had dutifully named him after his father, Mbande, the future king of Ndongo. This one was a girl. The birth was difficult; the baby was breech, her face was upturned, and the umbilical cord was wrapped firmly around her neck. Royal attendants were able to safely guide the baby out of her mother’s body, but everyone present agreed that the birth foretold an unusual life. Mbande, who openly doted on Kengela as his favourite concubine, was immediately smitten with his newest child. He named her Njinga, from the Kimbundu verb kujinga, which means to twist or turn — ostensibly a reference to the cord wrapped around her neck. But perhaps as he held his daughter for the first time, he caught a brief glimpse of her future: how she would twist and turn to outwit her enemies, gain the throne, and, ultimately, fight for her country’s freedom.Looking for a Queens of Infamy t-shirt or tote bag? Choose yours here.
The kingdom of Ndongo was an early-modern African state located in present-day Angola, and, at the time of Njinga’s birth, a rancid combination of white people, colonialism, and the Atlantic slave trade were tearing it apart. The Portuguese had shown up in Ndongo in the late 15th century and had quickly realized that they could exploit the rich coastal lands for the glory (read: financial gain) of their empire. Of course, they claimed to be doing it in the name of bringing Jesus to the locals and saving their souls, but their definition of salvation included the transportation of millions of people across the Atlantic, where they forced them to work in brutal, degrading, and deadly conditions. The first direct slave voyage from Africa to the Americas happened by the early 1520s; by the time the first ship carrying enslaved Africans arrived in North America in 1619, the Atlantic slave trade was already in full swing in South America. The enormous scale of the operation is hard to wrap one’s mind around; tens of thousands of enslaved people were sent from Angola to Brazil between 1575 and 1595, a number that would climb into the millions before the practice was abolished in Portugal a few centuries later.
Because this type of discussion always generates some version of “but the Africans also enslaved each other,” allow me just to state up front that, yes, the people of Ndongo had a system of free and unfree individuals. People who were unfree fell into two categories: kijikos, similar to the serfs that had existed in Western Europe before the socio-economic upheaval of the Black Death, and mubikas, enslaved people who could be sold as property, most of whom had been captured in battles with other kingdoms. Of course any theft of human freedom is horrific, and the complexities of pre-colonial slavery in what would later become Angola are worth discussing within their own context. There is still a vast, vast difference between the system that existed before colonization and the operation the Portuguese created. Any comparison between the two in the year of our lord 2019 is made in bad faith.
The Portuguese presence in West Central Africa was limited at first to their trading posts and missions, but in 1571, Sebastian of Portugal — a pouty blond with firm calves — ordered the conquest and subjugation of all of Ndongo. All in Jesus’s name, no doubt. By the time Njinga’s father became king in 1593, her country had been at war for over a decade.
Much of Njinga’s legacy in the West has been rooted in racist, sexist propaganda created by white people; it’s only recently that a more accurate depiction of her life has begun to gain traction outside of her homeland. The credit for this shift goes to scholars like Linda M. Heywood, who have meticulously stitched together academic sources, contemporary documents, and details passed down through oral traditions to create a fully fleshed-out portrait of Njinga and her accomplishments. Heywood’s book Njinga of Angola is considered to be one of the most authoritative biographies of the queen and is the source for most of the facts in this piece.
* * *
Njinga was her father’s clear favorite throughout her childhood. She was 10 when Mbande became the ngola, or king, of Ngondo (“Angola” comes from the Portuguese misunderstanding the meaning of ngola and thinking it was the name of the kingdom). He often involved her in his official duties: she attended many of the legal councils that her father oversaw, received military training, and participated in the ritual activities that were so vital to their culture. The fact that she was a girl and not even the child of his principal wife made all of this very unusual, but then again maybe this explains why Mbande a Ngola felt comfortable to display his preference so publicly. It would have been unheard of to lavish that kind of individual attention on any of his sons; to do so meant risking jealousy not only among them, but also among their mothers, many of whom came from powerful families. A daughter, though, was different — for one thing, no one really viewed her as direct competition. Besides, everyone agreed that Njinga was special. She outperformed her brothers in every capacity, including with the battle axe, which was the royal weapon of choice.
NJINGA: boys!
NJINGA: they’re such simple creatures
NJINGA: so thirsty for their father’s affections
NJINGA: so easy to humiliate
NJINGA: it’s like shooting fish in a barrel, if all the fish also had serious daddy issues
Even as Njinga was living large and serving up slices of emasculation pie to her brothers, Ndongo was deeply embroiled in conflict. The Imbangala, a militarized nomadic society of young people living in war camps, had long been harassing Ndongo on their own; now they joined up with the Portuguese. The Imbangala wanted the Ndongo territory, and the Portuguese wanted to destabilize the kingdom and enslave the refugees created by the Imbangala invasion. It was a powerful alliance, and one that Njinga’s father struggled to counter with the men or arms at his disposal.
The king tried everything — open warfare, diplomacy, negotiation — but the forces he was facing were implacable. To make matters worse, many regional Ndongo leaders began defecting to the Portuguese once they saw which way the tide was turning. This shocking betrayal gutted Mbande a Ngola. Not only had those regional leaders been contributing manpower to the fight, their annual tributes to the king had underpinned the financial and administrative cohesion of Ndongo. With these tributes going to the Portuguese instead, the kingdom began to crumble in earnest. By the time his own men ambushed and murdered Mbande a Ngola in 1617, he held just a fraction of the territory his father had passed on to him. What was left of Ndongo soon fell into a succession crisis.
The king-making system in Ndongo was complex. Claimants to the throne had to be of noble lineage, which made for a large pool of candidates, as kings tended to have many children by both wives and concubines. They also had to be elected into the position by specially-designated court officials. Having a multi-level qualification process typically resulted in a peaceful transfer of power, but the chaos following Mbande a Ngola’s death meant that business was not proceeding as usual. Njinga’s older brother Ngola Mbande, with whom she shared both parents, decided to make his move. Normally a concubine’s son would have had a weak claim to the throne, but he worked the political turmoil following his father’s death to his advantage and staged a coup in the capital before the traditional electors could assemble. He consolidated his power by making sure that he had no male relatives who might interfere with his accession, swiftly killing off his half-brother (who, as the son of Mbande a Ngola’s chief wife, represented his main competition), the rest of his half-brother’s family, and many prominent members of the court. Then he came for his sisters.
First, Ngola Mbande murdered Njinga’s newborn son, her first and only child. Next, he purportedly ordered the sterilization of Njinga and their sisters, Kambu and Funji, with herbs and boiling oils. Satisfied that none of his full-blood siblings would be able to produce a male heir, he let them live.
NJINGA: obviously I’m glad I wasn’t killed
NJINGA: but, objectively, it wasn’t a very smart move on his part
NJINGA: a lot of assumptions going on there
NJINGA: that women aren’t a threat unless they have sons
NJINGA: that they won’t seek revenge
NJINGA: just a whole lot of assumptions
Ngola Mbande may have thought he was playing the long game, but Njinga was on a different level entirely. Her game was a universe unto itself, expanding ever outwards and snickering cosmically at anything that might cross its path.
* * *
Njinga plotted and bided for so long that eventually Ngola Mbande just assumed things were cool between them again. That time he murdered her only child? Water under the bridge, probably! Women get so emotional about these things but you’ve just got to give them time to calm down. Things in fact seemed so chill to the king that he decided to turn to his sister for help. You know how it is when you’ve poured boiling oil on a person’s reproductive organs but then, haha oh man awkward, you need to ask them to do you a solid.
By 1621, Ngola Mbande’s rule was in a precarious position. The Portuguese were pressuring him on all sides, with increased violence, an expansion in the Atlantic slave trade, and the kidnapping of several highly-placed members of the royal family. Njinga was 39 years old at this point, estranged from her brother and living to the east of Ndongo in the kingdom of Matamba; in the years since her brother’s attack, she had spent her time honing her reputation for leadership both on and off the battlefield. When a new governor of Portuguese Angola was appointed, the king sensed that the moment for negotiating was ripe, and asked his sister to be his ambassador to the Portuguese Angolan capital of Luanda. Njinga, amazingly, did not immediately respond with FUCK YOU FOR KILLING MY KID, but instead agreed. In early 1622, she entered Luanda with an impressive retinue. It must have seemed like she’d been training for this moment her whole life. After all those years of learning at her father’s feet, of honing her skills, of pushing through her degradation and pain, she was finally going to show the Portuguese that the Ndongo people were a force to be reckoned with. The fact that she would also publicly humiliate her brother by outshining him once again was just icing on the cake.
Njinga arrived in Luanda dressed in traditional clothing, which was unusual given her station. Most dignitaries from Ndongo would wear opulent Portuguese fashions when meeting with them as a way of sartorially placing themselves on the same level, but Njinga felt that would be a tacit acknowledgement that the people of Ndongo were inferior to the colonizers. Witnesses describe her as being draped in expensive fabrics, dripping with priceless jewels, colorful feathers bedecking her elaborate hairstyles. During the negotiations, Governor João Correia de Sousa tried to humiliate her by having her sit on the floor while he perched on a velvet chair, but Njinga was equal to this: she ordered a female attendant to get on her hands and knees and sat on her the entire time. It was a dense lasagna of power moves, with layers targeting not just the governor, but also her own people, especially those who might doubt her abilities. The message was: none of you had better step the fuck out of line.
She flattered the Portuguese and acceded to many of their requests, promising them that her brother would cease military operations if they did the same. The only issue on which she remained unbending was the governor’s demand that Ngola Mbande pay an annual tribute to the Portuguese king. This, she said, would have been fair if they were a conquered state, but her brother was not a vassal. He was a sovereign king negotiating with an equal. When the governor expressed suspicion at the idea that Ngola Mbande actually wanted peace, Njinga played her trump card: if the Portuguese agreed to her brother’s terms, she would agree to study the Christian catechism and to be baptized. After all, hadn’t the Portuguese invaded Africa in order to save souls? And here was a royal soul fresh for the picking. Were the Portuguese implying that her soul was worth less than an earthly tribute? Caught in a Jesus snare of their own making, the Portuguese didn’t have much choice but to agree to Njinga’s conditions.
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Njinga seemed to embrace her new religion, studying its rituals with enthusiasm. She took the baptismal name Ana de Sousa after her godparents, Ana da Silva (whose family she stayed with during the negotiations) and Governor de Sousa. The government officials came to greatly respect Njinga, and she later said that this was a time of great happiness in her life. It was also a diplomatic success; by the time she left Luanda, Njinga had secured a promise for a peace treaty.
* * *
In spite of Njinga’s ingenious politicking, the promise of peace did not last. An alliance that Ngola Mbande had made with the Imbangala collapsed and the Ndongo court was driven out of their capital of Kabasa. The Portuguese wouldn’t put the treaty into action while the king was in exile and unbaptized, and Njinga, in turn, was pressuring her brother into refusing the latter of these terms. In the wake of his sister’s success in Luanda, Ngola Mbande had come to rely heavily on her counsel. Now he listened attentively as she swore that it would be humiliating for the King of Ndongo to submit to a foreign power, and would amount to a betrayal of their customs. A conversion, Njinga said, would cause all of his supporters to abandon him. If this seems a little much coming from the person who had just gone through a strategic baptism, it might be worth considering Njinga’s private desire to undermine her brother. Of course, every word she said was completely true! But also: she had a slow revenge to wreak.
NJINGA: the Portuguese betrayed us in the end
NJINGA: in case you haven’t quite caught the theme of colonialism yet
NJINGA: as it turns out, their promises are worth less than shit
NJINGA: shit is useful for fertilizing, at least
NJINGA: anyway, my brother died by poisoning two years after my trip to Luanda, a broken man
NJINGA: some said the poison was self-administered
NJINGA: some said that I did it
NJINGA: but, truly, secret killings are not my style at all
More here...
