Two native women: Malintzin and Anacaona

The outstanding example of Queen Njinga in Ndongo stands in contrast to the experiences of two other women whose encounters with Europeans are known, albeit in fragmentary form, from the testimonies of the colonists.

Bernal Diaz del Castillo (1494–1584), one of Cortes’s soldiers who wrote a self-serving True History of the Conquest of New Spain, was immediately struck by Malintzin’s beauty and grace – he called her Doña Marina. But it also became apparent that, since she was bilingual in Mayan and in Nahuatl, and highly regarded among her native people, she might be of practical use to the invaders. Cortes began to employ her as an interpreter. She learned Spanish and became his indispensable aide. Contemporary indigenous drawings unfailingly show her at Cortes’s side and so we have, if not her portrait, then at least caricatures of her, dressed in native poncho, in the company of armed and armoured conquistadors.

Bernal Diaz tells a story that indicates both her local influence in smoothing a path for the invaders and her magnanimity:

Doña Marina was a person of great importance, and was obeyed without question by all the Indians of New Spain. And while Cortes was in the town of Coatzacoalcos, he summoned all the caziques of that province in order to address them on the subject of our holy religion, and the good way in which they had been treated; and Doña Marina’s mother and her half-brother Lazaro were among those who came… Both she and her son were very much afraid of Doña Marina; they feared that she had sent for them to put them to death, and they wept.

Malintzin – or La Malinche, as she came to be called^† – won an enduring but unattractive reputation among some Mexican tribes as a traitor, when she warned Cortes of a native uprising against his army. Later, like all good interpreters, Malintzin learned her own diplomatic skills. According to Bernal Diaz, who says he was present, she was with Cortes when he and his captains captured Moctezuma II (1460–1520), the great Aztec emperor, in his palace at Tenochtitlan (now Mexico City). During an angry discussion among the Spanish, several of whom wanted to kill him on the spot, the emperor asked Malintzin what they were saying:

…she, being very quick-witted, replied, ‘Lord Moctezuma, I advise you to accompany them immediately to their quarters and make no protest. I know they will treat you very honourably as the great prince you are. But if you stay here, you will be a dead man…’⁴

In the event, the emperor seems to have been pelted to death by his own people. Malintzin’s loyalty to Cortes during this period went beyond confidential intelligence: she became his lover and in 1522, after the dramatic conquest of the Aztec capital at Tenochtitlan, she bore a son, Martin. He is regarded as one of the first mestizos – of mixed European and indigenous ancestry.^‡ Cortes built Malintzin a house just a few miles away at Coyoacan and she lived there for two or three years before accompanying him on an expedition to put down a rebellion in Honduras, leaving her son behind in the care of a Cortes cousin. We know that some time later she married a Spanish nobleman at Orizaba in Veracruz; she is variously supposed to have died in 1529, or in the 1550s.

Since her subsequent career was lived outwith the army of conquest and therefore beyond the horizon of Diaz’s narrative, nothing more is known of Malintzin, but her son, Martin, was taken to Spain by his father in about 1528.

A quite different, and more damning, Spanish account of interaction with a native population comes from the pen of a Dominican friar, Bartolome de las Casas (1474–1566), whose experiences in Cuba in the 1510s turned him very much against his fellow countrymen, whom he was to accuse of atrocities and genocide. Of the many cruelties he recorded from the testimony of witnesses, few resonate so loudly as the story of Anacaona (1474–1503), a Taino cacique who ruled one of the five chiefdoms of the island of Hispaniola (now Haiti in the west and the Dominican Republic in the east) in partnership with her brother Behechio.

Their first substantial experience of European intentions came in 1496, a mere four years after Cristobal Colon’s (Christopher Columbus’s) voyage of exploration to the Indies. His brother, Bartolome, had been appointed Adelantado, or governor, under licence from King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Castile. But the Spanish hold on the island was tenuous, frequently under threat from disease, food shortages and local resistance. Constantly on the move to find less hostile territory and new resources to support themselves, Colon’s party marched west towards the long Xaragua peninsula. They were met by the army of the cacique Behechio whose sister, Anacaona, was married to the chief of a neighbouring territory – the sort of political alliance that in Anglo-Saxon England would have made her a peace-weaver. In Xaraguan society, according to the early Spanish chroniclers, royal heirs were chosen from the sons of the cacique’s sister, giving her a peculiarly powerful status.^§

The welcome afforded to Colon’s force was promising, with elaborate rituals and gifts on display, guaranteed to oil the wheels of diplomacy and, perhaps, to ensure Spanish support in the internal politics of the island:

Out came infinite people and many seniores and nobility, whose seats were of all the province of the king Behechio and the queen, his sister, Anacaona, singing their songs and dancing their dances, which they called areytos, things that were very pleasant and agreeable to see, especially when their numbers were great. Out came thirty women, who were kept as wives of the king Behechio, all completely naked, only covering their private parts with half-skirts of cotton, white and very elaborate in their style of weaving, which they call naguas, which cover from the belt to the middle of the leg; they were carrying green branches in their hands, singing and dancing and jumping with moderation, as is suitable for women, and showing great peace, delight, happiness, and the spirit of a party.

The Spaniards were billeted in the houses of Behechio’s village, set around a formal plaza with his own house, the largest, maintained as a place of feasting. Evidently the hospitality was both lavish and sexually generous. The following day, festivities were held: ball games, dancing and a mock battle, which got alarmingly out of hand and resulted in some nasty injuries. Afterwards, the two parties sat down to formal business:

After all of these fiestas and rejoicing, D. Bartolome Colon spoke to the king Behechio and this lady, his sister Anacaona, about how his brother the Almirante [Admiral] had been sent by the king and queen of Castile, who were very great kings and lords and had many kingdoms and people under their dominion, and that Colon had returned to Castile to see them and tell them of the many lords and people of this island who were already giving tribute, and of the tribute that they paid, and it was for this reason that the Adelantado had come to him and his kingdom, so that they might see him and be received as lords and in sign of their subservience they might give some tribute.⁶

What the Spanish needed most was food; and the cacique and his sister agreed to supply them with cassava bread, dried fish and cotton in return for being, broadly speaking, left alone. It is the politics of the protection racket. Early the following year, 1497, the Spanish returned to collect their tribute. Again, they were fêted. Now Colon sent for a caravel to be sailed along the north coast to the nearest harbour, some six miles away from the village. Anacaona suggested to her brother that they go to meet the ship, staying overnight along the way in one of her own settlements, a sort of hamlet-cum-treasury where she stored many prestige goods. Among these were highly prized carved wooden objects such as zoomorphically shaped ritual chairs, called duhos, made by the women of the island from the dense, hard wood lignum vitae…

The Lady presented Don Bartolome with many of these seats, the most beautiful, which were all black and polished as if they were of azavaja [jet]; and offered all the other things which were for table service (and naguas of cotton, which were like little skirts carried by the women from the waist to midleg, woven of the same cotton, white and marvellous) and it pleased them for him to take whatever he would.

Anacaona, then, was conducting her own, independent diplomacy with Colon, a reflection of her political and social status, and one suspects that she might have been seeking a more intimate alliance with the new power in the land. When they arrived at the coast…

The king and the queen, his sister, each had canoes, very large and well painted and prepared, but the lady, being so regal, did not want to go in the canoe, but only with Don Bartolome in the boat.⁸

In return, and as a gesture of superiority, the caravel fired off a number of its cannon, spreading general panic among the Taini until Colon’s laughter convinced them that it was merely a performance to amuse them: an early display of gunboat diplomacy.

Six years later, in 1502, a new governor visited. Behechio had by now died and Anacaona now ruled solely as queen of Xaragua. The new Adelantado, Nicolas de Ovando, charged with controlling the unauthorised settlement of Spanish renegades in Xaraguan territory, arrived without any knowledge of the previously cordial relations between Colon and the Xaraguan caciques. The version of events told by Bartolome de las Casas, in his Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, is brief and shocking. Anacaona prepared for the new governor’s visit as she had before, and welcomed his party of soldiers with her customary hospitality. However:

…to this kingdom there came one day the governor who ruled this island, with sixty horse and three hundred foot or more, though those on horse be enough to lay waste to the entire island and Terra Firma. And above three hundred lords and nobles went out to him when he called them, promising them no harm, and he commanded that most of those lords be put by deceit and guile into a very large house of straw, and when they were closed up within, he ordered that the house be set a-fire and those lords and nobles be burned alive. And then they rushed upon all the others and put an infinite number of people to the sword, and the lady Anacaona, to show her the honour due her, they hanged her.⁹

Like Njinga and Malintzin, Anacaona’s bit-part role in the narrative of European conquest is all too short. Only Njinga has left her own words to indicate something of her relations with the invaders. Even so, we can say that in the Americas and in Africa women’s exercise of power and the political and social skills that went with it were part of the indigenous cultural repertoire. Parallel narratives recorded in their arts and crafts show that women made and displayed nuanced, complex and confident expressions of solidarity, ideology and their own capabilities. Evidence is also emerging that in some societies women possessed the means to mediate their status even more directly.