Queen Njinga of Ndongo

Njinga Mbande (1582–1663), scion of a dynasty competing for power in what is now Angola in southwest Africa, forged a brilliantly successful political career by exploiting existing rules of power and patronage in a new and expanding world – just as Empress Wu had in Imperial China.

By the time of Njinga’s birth, the vast country south of the equatorial kingdom of Kongo had been on the radar of Portuguese explorers, traders and proselytising Jesuits for a hundred years. Their settlement at Luanda on the Atlantic coast dates from about 1575, when it was established with the arrival of a garrison of 400 soldiers and 100 Portuguese families, keen to exploit rich silver deposits and a ready supply of slaves for shipment to transatlantic colonies in Brazil. Ndongo, the territory south and east of Luanda along the Cuanza River, was one of a number of tribal kingdoms subject to the overlordship of Kongo. It is thought to have been home to about 100,000 people at the start of the seventeenth century, with settlements of villages clustered around small towns, each ruled by a petty chief: a souba.

During the sixteenth century, kings of Ndongo had courted Portuguese military support in the hope of throwing off Kongan overlordship. But after the foundation of Luanda, its captain-governor, Paulo Dias de Novais, formed alliances with both Kongo and Ndongo rulers and operated as a quasi-autonomous mercenary warlord. A series of conflicts followed, during which Portuguese exploitation of regional rivalries allowed them to establish a coastal province and intervene with increasing effectiveness in Angolan politics.

By 1617 a Portuguese army was able to sack Ndongo’s inland capital at Kabasa and force its king, Ngola Mbande, into humiliating negotiations.

In 1624, after the suicide of her brother, Njinga acted as regent for her young nephew before, so it is said, having him killed. She was now elected queen by a powerful group of nobles; but rival factions declared her rule illegitimate and sided with the Portuguese in attempting to oust her. A year later, the forces under her personal command were defeated; she retreated to the highlands in the east while the Portuguese installed a rival, Hari, as puppet king in the west. In turn, Njinga forged a politically risky and compromising military alliance with the Jaga, a Spartan-like warrior caste prone to infanticide and blood sacrifice, alongside whom she prosecuted a savage ongoing war against the colonial power. Two campaigns against the Portuguese were unsuccessful; after the second she was forced to flee her island fortress on the Cuanza River in a desperate retreat. But she survived; and for the next thirty years Njinga fought to establish a new kingdom of Ndongo and Matamba in an ongoing struggle against Hari and his Portuguese sponsors.

Acutely sensitive to her fragile legitimacy as a female ruler, during the 1640s Njinga symbolically ‘became a man’, keeping a harem of male concubines dressed in female clothes and personally leading her warriors into battle. She formed a battalion of her own ladies-in-waiting as a household guard. She impressed visiting Europeans with her skills in weaponry and her remarkable oratory. Her emissaries were able to recite long messages from her in sophisticated prose: verbal communiques beyond the capabilities of the colonial audience.

From the year 1626, two years after her brother’s death, we have a letter from Njinga to the military commander Bento Banha Cardoso, dictated to a functionary who translated it into Portuguese:

On Saturday, one of my muenho^* servants arrived here and told me that in Ambaca a large force had gathered, waiting for Your Honour to move against me to free the Portuguese held in captivity.

Njinga was not to be cowed or manipulated. She showed that she had good intelligence of her opponents’ plans and that she was not easily misled by their manoeuvrings. She had, it seems, already become adept in constructing diplomatic narrative in the European style, countering accusations of perfidy with flattery, offer with demand, assuring him of her good intentions and ending, like many a diplomatic letter, with a disarming request:

I ask that Your Honour send me a hammock, and four ells of red wool for a cover, a horse blanket, and good wine, and an arroba [about a third of a hundredweight] of wax for candles, and half a dozen lengths of muslin, and two or three lace tablecloths, and some purple, wine-coloured and blue garnets, and a large broad-brim hat made of blue velvet, or the one Your Honour wears, and four measures of paper.

In the 1630s Njinga consolidated her rule in Ndongo and Matamba, inland from the Portuguese colony. During the next decade, Luanda was seized from Portuguese control by a Dutch force, and Njinga exploited the opportunity to forge an alliance with the new power, winning significant victories during the 1640s. Fortunes fluctuated. By 1655, when she wrote a very long letter (which survives) to the governor-general, Njinga was over seventy. Her faculties were undiminished but now, tiring of war, she opened up a new diplomatic initiative, which shows a touching preoccupation with the return of her sister, Doña Barbara, long held by the Portuguese as a hostage:

I read that Your Lordship is in good health, which I hope Our Lord will increase for many long years, along with as much peace and tranquillity as I desire for myself… You stated your purposes with so much merit that I saw directly that you speak the truth in all you say.

Njinga offers, as a carrot, her support in a Portuguese project to conquer the province of Qissama, south of the Cuanza River – a thing, she says, that no previous governor has earned the glory of accomplishing. She will dispatch a large force under one of her commanders to assist him; and further, if her sister is returned, she will abjure the heathen practices of her Jaga allies and hand over to the governor the Jaga leader Cabuco. The language is silky and artful, the very essence of diplomatique. Then comes the hard talk, in a voice sharpened by the bitter experience of betrayal…

With respect to the two hundred slaves Your Lordship requested as ransom for my sister Doña Barbara, that is a very exacting price, particularly since I have already given the slaves Your Honour must know of to past governors and envoys, to say nothing of my gifts to secretaries and servants from your noble house and to many settlers whose treachery I still endure to this day. What I am so bold as to offer Your Honour is one hundred and thirty slaves, a hundred of whom I will send as soon as my sister reaches [the fort at] Ambaca. I will keep your envoy hostage until I can see with my own eyes my sister arriving in my court…

And finally, in refined style, a conclusion sweetened with charm…

The offering Your Lordship sent me, and for which I render you many thanks, was delivered to me by your envoy. I appreciated the mother-of-pearl goblet very much. Do not be weary of me, Your Lordship, but I want for nothing in my court. What I miss the most is my sister. Once she returns to me Your Lordship will see that I will serve Your Lordship much to your liking…

A year later, after signing a new treaty with the colonial power that recognised the legitimacy of her rule of Ndongo and Matamba, Queen Njinga was re-accepted into the church. She fostered the presence of missionaries in her territories and was able, on her death at the age of eighty, to pass the kingdom on to her sister Doña Barbara. Over the course of the next century, four more queens were rulers of Ndongo and Matamba. In twentieth-century Angola, riven by civil war and continued foreign exploitation of its natural resources, Njinga is an icon of liberation and the fight against oppression. A bronze statue of her stands in Luanda. She, and many other African rulers whose stories are even less easily told, serve to prick the myth propagated and maintained by the colonial powers that Africans were not capable of statesmanship or worthy of trust.