Queen Nzinga Mbande

Nzinga was born around 1583 at Kabasa in the kingdom of Ndongo — the central highland polity that the Portuguese, mishearing the title of its ruler ngola, would within a generation call Angola. She was the daughter of Kiluanji kia Samba, the ngola who reigned from 1575 to 1617, and the favoured concubine Kangela. The Portuguese, since the establishment of their fortified colony at Luanda in 1575, had been systematically raiding Ndongo for slaves and the polity was in a state of intermittent war for the four decades of her youth.

She entered the historical record in 1622 as ambassador for her brother Mbandi to the Portuguese governor João Correia de Sousa at Luanda. The Portuguese chronicler João de Cadornega preserves the audience: presented with a chair lower than the governor's, she ordered an attendant to kneel and sat upon his back. The peace she negotiated freed Ndongo's hostages but the Portuguese repudiated it within months. Mbandi died — possibly by Nzinga's order — in 1624 and she acceded as ngola in her own right.

Across the following thirty-eight years she fought the Portuguese as a regular field commander. When driven from Ndongo in 1626 she conquered the neighbouring kingdom of Matamba and ruled both kingdoms in a federation. She allied with the Dutch West India Company during their occupation of Luanda from 1641 to 1648, fielded against the Portuguese a combined army of Imbangala mercenaries and Ndongo regulars, and was decisively defeated only once — at Kavanga in 1646. Even after that defeat she fought a guerrilla war from Matamba for another decade until the negotiated peace of 1657 secured for her the independent sovereignty of Matamba.

She died at Matamba on the seventeenth of December 1663, at approximately eighty. The independence she secured for Matamba lasted until the late nineteenth-century Portuguese conquest.

She is honored here as the queen who fought the Portuguese for forty years.