Nzinga Queen of Ndongo

In 1624 or 1625, depending on the source, Nzinga Mbande took power in Ndongo, a kingdom of the Mbundu people in what is now northern Angola. Over the following decades she fought, bargained with, and outmaneuvered the Portuguese, who were building a slaving colony on the coast. Her long resistance made her one of the most remembered African rulers of the early modern period, and in Angola today she is a national symbol.

Ndongo was a rival of the neighboring Kongo kingdom and lay inland from Luanda, which the Portuguese founded in 1576 and which became a major port for the Atlantic slave trade. Portuguese forces repeatedly raided and fought Ndongo, and the kingdom's rulers, who carried the title ngola, were under heavy pressure. Nzinga was the sister of the ruler Ngola Mbandi. Around 1622 he sent her to negotiate with the Portuguese governor in Luanda. Accounts of that meeting, written later, say she refused to stand in a subordinate position. She is said to have had an attendant serve as her seat, though this story comes from later writers and its details are uncertain. She secured a treaty and was baptized as a Christian, taking the name Ana de Sousa.

The Portuguese failed to keep their side of the agreement, and Ngola Mbandi died around 1624. Sources disagree over how, and some Portuguese writers accused Nzinga of causing his death, a claim historians treat cautiously. She took the throne, but many Mbundu nobles contested a woman's rule, and the Portuguese backed a rival. Driven from her lands, she moved east and, by the 1630s, had established herself in Matamba. She also took control of the Kingdom of Matamba and made it a base from which to raid the Portuguese and to trade.

Nzinga was a shrewd political and military leader. She allied with the Dutch, who seized Luanda in 1641, and she took in refugees and runaway slaves, building up her forces. She also allowed the sale of captives from the interior, since Matamba's power depended on the same trade that devastated the region. After the Portuguese retook Luanda in 1648, she lost the Dutch alliance and continued to fight. In 1656 she made peace with Portugal, a settlement that kept Matamba independent.

Nzinga died in 1663, in her eighties. Portuguese conquest of the region continued after her death, though full colonial control of Angola took until the early twentieth century. Her legacy has been reshaped many times. Seventeenth-century European writers painted her as both a cunning diplomat and a ruthless tyrant. In the twentieth century, anti-colonial movements in Angola claimed her as a forerunner of independence. Historians today emphasize that she was a skilled ruler working within a violent world, and that her story is more complicated than either her enemies or her admirers allowed.