Queen Nzinga of Ndongo and Matamba

Nzinga Mbande was born in 1583, daughter of the ngola — king — of Ndongo, a kingdom on the Atlantic coast of present-day Angola whose name the Portuguese would Latinize as Angola itself. She inherited a kingdom under existential assault: Portuguese slavers had been raiding the Ndongo interior since 1576, and the war that followed would last, in one form or another, for the rest of her life.

In 1622 she led the Ndongo embassy to Luanda to negotiate with the Portuguese governor. The chair offered her by the governor was deliberately lower than his own; the contemporary chronicle records that she instructed one of her attendants to kneel and serve as her seat. She negotiated peace terms favorable to Ndongo. The Portuguese broke them within two years.

She became queen of Ndongo in 1626. When Portuguese pressure forced her from the kingdom, she conquered the neighboring kingdom of Matamba and ruled both states from there. For the next four decades — until her death in 1663, age eighty — she waged the longest sustained anti-slavery resistance in the Atlantic record. She allied with the Dutch when their interests aligned with hers, abandoned them when they did not, accepted defectors from Portuguese-enslaved companies into her army, and maintained a guerrilla force that the Portuguese were never able to defeat in open battle.

She converted to Catholicism in 1622, repudiated the conversion, converted again toward the end of her life; she negotiated peace; she resumed war. Her diplomatic correspondence with the Vatican is preserved in the Roman archives. The kingdom she built and bequeathed to her sister Mukambu held off Portuguese conquest until the late nineteenth century.

She is honored here as the queen who, for four decades, refused the bargain of the slave trade and built a state that would refuse it for two centuries more.