History Of Queen Nzinga
Queen Nzinga Mbande was Ndongo’s most famous queen, and in Angola, she is still seen as a national hero. King Mbande, a Ngola, had her as his eldest daughter. During his long reign, he fought against the Portuguese invasion of Angola, which began in 1575, and tried to consolidate power in Ndongo. In Ndongo’s early years, Queen Nzinga saw her through her worst problems.
She was born in 1582, not long after the war between Ndongo and Portugal. She lived to see her brother, Ngola Mbande, become king around 1617. From 1617 to 1620, she also witnessed the imbangala mercenaries and army of Portuguese governor Luis Mendes de Vasconcellos destroy the kingdom of Ndongo.
The Portuguese brought the Imbangala from south of the Kwanza in 1615. They were cruel cannibals who replaced their dead with teenage boys who wanted to join their army. After Mendes de Vasconcellos’s failed campaigns in 1622, Ngola Mbande sent her from his new home on the islands of the Kwanza River to Luanda to try to make peace between the two countries.
Later, it was said that when the governor didn’t give her a seat, which was a sign of submission, she sat on the back of her serving girl to show that her country would still be independent. She was baptized Ana de Sousa and promised to help her country become more Christian during this trip.
When Ngola Mbande killed himself in 1624, Ndongo had a very serious problem with who would take over as king. Ngola Mbande’s son was too young to become king, and the main goal of the two kings before him had been to centralize power and limit primogeniture succession by getting rid of some of the electoral parts of it, especially the role of the elite.
With the court and royal officials’ approval, Njinga made herself regent of Ngola Mbande’s young son. But when the son was killed (maybe at her order), she took on the royal role herself. Portugal not only wanted to back a vassal for the throne, but they also wanted to make sure that the troops and farmworkers who were once under Ndongo’s control did not run away to Njinga but instead stayed and worked for the new colony of Angola.
During the next war, both Queen Nzinga and Portugal used groups of Imbangala soldiers to help them fight. In 1625, Njinga was defeated and had to leave Ndongo’s capital in the Kwanza Islands. Queen Nzinga quickly returned to the islands, but was driven out again in 1628–1629 when her Imbangala supporters turned against her.
Queen Nzinga ran east with her troops and tried to join forces with Kasanje, the strongest Imbangala group in the area. She was turned down, and she became an Imbangala herself. She took over the kingdom of Matamba by using Imbangala techniques to make her army stronger. This would remain her base even after her forces took back the Kwanza Islands in the mid-1630s. By 1639, she had made things official between herself and the Portuguese settlement.
By becoming an Imbangala, Njinga rejected Christianity, but she never gave up the idea that she was the true leader of Ndongo, and she didn’t want to change her government to match what the Imbangala bands wanted. At all times, Njinga had to deal with claims that she wasn’t legitimate, especially the claim that women shouldn’t be in charge.
She tried being the caretaker for Ngola Mbande’s child and the queen to a male puppet king she picked, but neither worked out. She married two of these men in a row.
She also played a male part by leading her troops in battle and dressing like a man. At one point, she told her servants to dress like men and even sleep together without touching. Based on what other people said, she was a great leader and very good at using tools like the battle axe.
When the Dutch took over Luanda in 1641, Queen Nzinga tried to make a deal with them to help them fight the Portuguese, who were still grouped around Massangano. The Dutch only partially backed Njinga, but her army had very successful operations, first into the “Dembos” areas north of her domains and then against Massangano itself, which she almost took in 1648 but missed.
When the Dutch were forced out of Angola in 1648, Queen Nzinga stopped her advance. However, she quickly fought the larger Portuguese army to a standstill, which made them ask for peace in 1654. The final peace treaty, which was signed in 1657, recognized Queen Nzinga’s rights to Matamba and the Kwanza Islands. It also ordered the destruction of some Imbangala bands, told her she had to become a Christian, and gave her back her sister, who had been taken in 1646.
In the last few years of Njinga’s reign, she looked for a good person to take over as queen. She didn’t have any children and was trying to stop either angry lords or Imbangala soldiers in her army from trying to take over as rulers instead of the royal family of Ndongo.
Queen Nzinga tried to find a middle ground by letting preachers back in and becoming a practicing Catholic. She also set up a marriage between her sister, whom she named as her successor, and Njinga Mona, the leader of the Imbangala people, and she helped another noble family, the Ngola Kanini, get better jobs. In the pact of 1657, she got the Portuguese to agree to help her with her plans.
After she died in 1663, there was fighting between the Imbangala and the Christian-legitimist groups, with rare help from the Portuguese. After her sister died in 1666, supporters of both Ngola Kanini and Njinga Mona fought for the throne.
It wasn’t until 1681 that the Ngola Kanini line finally won. This family, also called the Guterres, took over Queen Nzinga’s kingdom and ruled it for another hundred years. Some of Queen Nzinga’s most important successors, like Veronica I (1681–1721) and Ana II (1742–1756), were women, so her fight to be seen as a genuine female ruler had big effects.
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