Long Live the Queens. Emma Marriott

favoured his bright daughter and she was allowed to accompany him on royal visits. When he died, her brother inherited the throne, after which Portuguese forces continued to sweep through the kingdom, abducting and selling thousands of its people into slavery. Nzinga’s task in 1622, as an envoy of her brother, was to negotiate with the Portuguese Governor, João Correia de Sousa, in the new settlement of Luanda (now the capital of Angola). The aim was to secure the independence of Ndongo whilst at the same time enlisting Portuguese help in expelling their rivals, the Imbangala, a fearsome warrior tribe, from the Ndongo kingdom. The story goes that when Nzinga met the Governor, he was sat on a velvet-covered chair, whilst she was given a mat to sit on. Unwilling to be treated as an inferior, she ordered one of her maid servants to get down on all fours so she could sit on her back during the discussion. The result was a peace treaty on equal terms, and Ndongo retained its independent status. One concession Nzinga did make to the Portuguese was that she converted to Catholicism, adopting the name Dona Ana de Sousa in honour of the Governor’s wife, a conversion that one suspects was done primarily for political reasons.

      Two years later, Nzinga’s brother died – some say that Nzinga had him killed, along with her nephew (cue grisly bit) whose heart she ate afterwards. Whatever the truth, she assumed power as Queen Nzinga. The Portuguese, in the meantime, failed to honour the treaty and continued to raid her kingdom and enslave her people. By 1626, Nzinga was driven out of Ndongo by the Portuguese and she led her people further east to Matamba, where she conquered the Jaga tribe. There, she also offered sanctuary to runaway slaves and soldiers trained by the Portuguese, and formed her own militias. In alliance with former rival states, she led an army against the Portuguese in what would become a thirty-year war.

In 1641, the Dutch, with African allies, seized Luanda from the Portuguese and Nzinga swiftly joined forces with the new occupiers. She conducted a series of campaigns against the puppet monarch the Portuguese had put in place in Ndongo, and in 1643 she routed the Portuguese outside Mbaka. She secured further victories in 1647 and 1648 – and is reported to have rode out into battle with her troops dressed as a man – although an intervening defeat by the Portuguese had led to the capture of Nzinga’s sister, Mukumbu, whilst another captive sister who had been spying for Nzinga was reputedly drowned by the Portuguese in the Kwanza River. In 1648, the Portuguese recaptured Luanda and Nzinga was forced to retreat to Matamba, where she resisted Portuguese troops well into her sixties.

      It is in Matamba where we have an eyewitness account of Queen Nzinga from the 1640s as written by the Dutch captain, Fuller, who had been put in charge of a body of men given to the service of the Queen. The Jaga, whom the Queen had conquered in Matamba, were said to have indulged in cannibalism and the infanticide of conquered enemies. Nzinga, for public effect, performed a ritual sacrifice wearing ‘man’s apparel’ of animal skins, with sword, axe and bow and arrow, leaping and striking two iron bells, before she selected her first victim, cutting off his head and drinking his blood.

      Again according to Fuller (and by this time Nzinga would have been well over sixty), she kept fifty or sixty men in a harem, who were allowed wives but any infants who were conceived had to be killed. Similarly, it was said that she selected some of her favourites of these men to dress in women’s clothes. The story obviously titillated the nineteenth-century French nobleman the Marquis de Sade, who revived the tale in his Philosophy in the Boudoir, claiming that Nzinga immolated each lover after a night together.

In 1856, Nzinga negotiated peace with the Portuguese, exchanging 130 slaves for the return of her still-captive sister, Mukumbu. In return, the Portuguese established a Christian mission in Matamba and the Jaga were forced to abandon their practice of infanticide. Nzinga herself reconverted to Christianity and focused on developing Matamba as a trading power, making the most of its position as the gateway to the interior of Central Africa. Despite many attempts by the Portuguese and their allies to dethrone or kill Queen Nzinga, she died peacefully at the age of eighty in 1663, leaving Matamba a strong commercial state.

      Queen Nzinga proved to be a constant thorn in the side of the Portuguese and one of Africa’s most successful, feared and respected leaders. The respect she earned lasted through the centuries, so much so that one America writer, in promoting the emancipation of the slaves, wrote in 1833: ‘History furnishes very few instances of bravery, intelligence and perseverance equal to the famous Zhinga, the queen of Angola.’