Queens of the World Queen Mzinga of Ndongo and Mutamba Mzinga was the queen regnant of the joint kingdoms of Ndongo and Mutamba in modern-day Angola. She stood up to the Portuguese colonialists and defended her people from enslavement. Her brilliance, pride, and perseverance forced the Portuguese to recognize her kingdoms. and she remains a symbol of freedom and resistance to oppression to this day. Nzinga was the daughter of Prince Colombo and his favorite concubine, Kinjela Ka Nkombe.
She was born during a difficult delivery. Her name, Nzinga, meaning to twist or to turn, was given to her because she emerged with the umbilical cord wrapped around her neck. This was thought to be a sign that the child would grow to be a powerful and proud person.
A wise woman present at the birth predicted that the baby would grow to be a queen. When Nzinga was 10, her father ascended the throne and became Ngola, or king of Ndongo. Nzinga was a bright and engaging child and was favored by her father.
As she was a girl, she was not seen as a potential heir or competitor for the throne like her brothers, so her father felt free to lavish attention on her. The princess was trained as a warrior to fight alongside her father and brothers. She was also taught how to read and write by Portuguese missionaries.
She was nearly always by her father's side as he attended his many official duties, including legal councils, war councils, and important rituals. And she learned a great deal along the way. King Quilombo faced a very difficult situation.
The Portuguese began taking over the coast of southwest Africa in the 15th century, enslaving the local people and transporting them to Brazil to work on plantations there. But in recent years, they had exhausted the coastal population and turned their attention inland to find more people to subjugate and fill the endless current of slave ships bound for the Americas. In 1571, King Sebastian of Portugal ordered the conquest of the Ndongo people. The Mbangala, a group of fierce and dreaded nomadic warriors, rumored to be cannibalistic, had joined forces with the Portuguese against the Ndongo. They wanted to seize Ndongo land and were happy to sell their prisoners of war to the Europeans.
Additionally, many of the Ndongo leaders were willing to sell their own countrymen into bondage. King Colombo tried both diplomacy and warfare to defend his people, but more and more of them were being stolen away. In 1617, when Nzinga was 34, her father died, or perhaps was killed, and her brother Mbandi came to the throne. Mbandi had long been jealous of Nzinga's exalted position in their father's eyes. He was paranoid that her baby son might one day rise up against him, so he had the child murdered.
He then had Nzinga and her sisters forcibly sterilized, so that there would be no further sons to threaten his power. Heartbroken, furious, and fearing for their lives, Nzinga and her husband fled Ndongo for the neighboring kingdom of Matomba. And from a safe distance, they watched as their homeland fell into chaos, famine, and terror under Umbandi's weak and inept rule.
Mbandi attempted to negotiate with the Portuguese, but he was no match for the indomitable colonial powers and was driven from his court. In desperation, he begged his sister to help him by serving as his ambassador to the Portuguese. She was an ideal choice for this mission as she spoke fluent Portuguese. Out of a desire to help her people, she agreed, but demanded that her brother give her an official royal title, an entourage of attendants and array her like a queen.
While most Africans wore European-style clothing when meeting with the Portuguese, Nzanga dressed herself in the finest apparel of her people, to display to them that her culture was not inferior. When she arrived in the port city of Luanda to meet the governor, all of the Portuguese men were sitting in chairs. However, there was no chair for Nzanga, only a mat on the floor on which she was expected to kneel in subordination.
Noble Ndanga refused to lower herself and instead ordered one of her servants to get on all fours on the mat and act as her throne. She was a talented and fierce negotiator, and while face to face with the governor, they agreed terms of a peace treaty. The Portuguese would withdraw their troops from Ndanga. cease demanding tribute and raiding the land for human chattel, and recognize the kingdom's independent sovereignty.
In return, Nzinga agreed to trade with the Portuguese, study Christianity, and be baptized. Nzinga remained in Luanda for six months, where she learned the Catholic faith and how to better understand the Portuguese culture. She was baptized and took the Christian name Donna Anna de Sousa in honor of the governor's wife.
who stood as her godmother. Nzinga returned home in triumph and glory, and she publicly berated her brother for his weakness and failure as a leader. Mbandi had lost all support from the people, and in disgrace, he committed suicide by drinking poison.
In 1625, Nzinga, now 41, took control of Ndongo. She was technically regent for her nephew, Kaza. the rightful male heir. Years earlier, Mbandi had entrusted his son to the care of the enemy warrior Mbangalas, and he had been living with them ever since. Nzinga met with the chief of the Mbangalas.
She flattered and seduced him and agreed to marry him. But when the Mbangalas arrived for the wedding ceremony, Nzinga seized her nephew, stabbed him to death, and threw his body in the river, declaring to all that she had finally avenged her husband. her own son's murder.
Nzinga was now secure on the throne of Ndongo, but she still had detractors among the nobility who were opposed to a woman's right to rule. Nzinga thus began living as a man, a common practice among female rulers in Central and West Africa, used to maintain their power. She engaged in masculine pursuits and took multiple husbands known as chabados. In Ndongo, the Chibados existed as a third sex.
They dressed as women and were able to marry men or women without stigma. They were an honored group of shaman who served as spiritual arbiters in political and military decisions and performed burial rites. Nzinga's Chibado husbands lived among her maids in waiting but were forbidden to engage in sexual relationships with them.
Europeans spread rumors that Nzinga's harem of husbands would fight to the death over who was allowed to spend the night with the queen. The peace Mzanga had negotiated with the Portuguese couldn't stand against the steamroller of imperialism and slavery. The Portuguese once again began to demand tribute, both monetary and human, from Mdongo.
The queen sent messengers into neighboring lands, armed with words of freedom and resistance. and many people unhappy living under the thumb of the Europeans fled to Ndongo. When the Portuguese demanded Nzinga return the people they saw as their property, she replied that there were no slaves in her kingdom. The Portuguese now saw that they would not be able to intimidate this dignified warrior queen or bend her to their will. So they used her gender and the fact that she had given up the Christian practices they had imposed upon her, in an attempt to delegitimize her rule and overthrow her.
Nzinga was proud, but she was also cunning. She knew that she would not win in an all-out war with the Portuguese. So she fled with her supporters to the Matamba region, where she courted new allies and planned her next move.
In this area, queens had ruled for centuries, and Nzinga's gender was far less of an obstacle. Nzinga continued to welcome escaped enslaved people. and warriors from other tribes and her army grew. Back in Ndongo, the Portuguese installed a puppet king, forced the people to convert to Christianity, outlawed their traditions, and enslaved and exported them at their whim. Meanwhile, another European power, the Dutch, moved onto the scene.
They wanted to disrupt the Portuguese expansion in Africa and profit from the valuable trade in human bondage. The Dutch had already overtaken the neighboring area of the Congo. Nzinga looked at this powerful enemy of her enemies and sent her emissaries.
She allied herself with the Dutch and together they went to war with the Portuguese. Nzinga personally led her army into battle. She was a skilled soldier as she had received martial and weaponry training from childhood. Nzinga and the Dutch overtook the Portuguese city of Luanda.
African leaders throughout the region, including the puppet king of Ndongo, submitted to Nzinga's rule. The Portuguese now saw that they had to take Nzinga very seriously. They regrouped, brought in reinforcements from Brazil, increased their firepower and overwhelmed Nzinga's army.
They took her sister Mkumbu, called Lady Barbara, as a prisoner and forced Nzinga to retreat once more. The queen continued to fight the Portuguese for decades, primarily using guerrilla tactics against their much stronger army. But eventually she resigned herself that this was a battle she could not win with military might.
So she turned once more to her cunning and developed a political and economic plan to halt Portuguese expansion and make her joint kingdoms of Undongo and Matamba a force the Europeans would have no choice but to respect. Her plan was two-fold. First, she placed her military forces between the Portuguese and the lands they raided for people to enslave, cutting off the slave trade in the area. Next, she reached out directly to the Catholic missionaries claiming she wanted to convert her kingdoms to Christianity. The missionaries were so enthralled by Queen Nzinga that many of them volunteered to act as her emissaries to the European leadership and even to the Pope.
With the might of the church on Nzinga's side, the Portuguese governor had little choice but to open up peace negotiations, release her sister, and eventually recognize Queen Nzinga as the official ruler of Ndongo and Matomba. Now in her 70s and finally secure on her throne, Nzinga turned her focus on domestic matters and concentrated on rebuilding her people who had been devastated by decades of warfare. She resettled refugees of the slave trade in her lands and encouraged women to bear children. And she promoted trade by capitalizing on her kingdom's strategic position as the gateway between the coast and the Central African interior. She waged one more military campaign to rid her people of the continued threat of the Mbungala warriors.
She decapitated the Mbungala leader and brought his head to the Portuguese governor. In her final years, Nzinga maintained her hard-won peace with the Portuguese by building churches and hosting baptisms. The 75-year-old queen also entered into a monogamous Christian marriage with a handsome young warrior one-third her age. But Nzinga also maintained the pride of her people and her place as their queen. She dressed fabulously, sporting the finest brocades, silks, velvets, and perfumes from Europe, while maintaining the style of her African people.
And she always wore a royal crown when conducting official duties. Queen Nzinga died peacefully in her sleep, in 1663 at the age of 80. She was briefly succeeded by her sister Mungkumbu, who outlived her by three years. After that, the kingdom fell into civil war over which male heir would reign next.
Without Nzinga's strength and leadership, the kingdom she had dedicated her life to building and defending fell to the ever-expanding Portuguese slave trade and was incorporated into Portuguese Angola in 1671, eight years after her death. But Nzinga did pave the way for women to lead. Queens ruled the Ndongo people for 80 of the 100 years following her death.
Today, 36% of the Angolese legislature is made up of women, compared to 32% for the UK and 23% for the US. Women in Angola display remarkable social independence and are found in the country's army, police, government and economic sectors. Queen Nzinga is revered for her political, martial and diplomatic brilliance.
She is held up as a symbol of freedom and resistance to oppression, and is celebrated as the Mother of Angola. If you enjoyed this video, please like, subscribe, comment your thoughts, and check out my other Royal History videos. If you really want to help, please consider supporting me on Patreon.
A link is in the description. Thank you for watching!