Kingdom of Ndongo

A kingdom under threat before it was old

formationDrafted from (ed.), General History of Africa, Volume V: Africa from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Century (1992)

Ndongo took shape around 1500 out of a merger of many small chiefdoms in the Kwanza River valley, south of Kongo - a very different foundation from the alliance of large existing provinces that had built Kongo two centuries earlier. Where Kongo's founding had joined established powers together, Ndongo's joined fragments, and the result was a state whose military system had to work harder than Kongo's own ever needed to, because Ndongo had no layer of provincial government above the level of the petty chiefdom to fall back on. What held Ndongo together in its first generation was less an inherited administrative hierarchy than an army built specifically to compensate for not having one.

Ndongo in Kongo's shadow

For at least the first two decades of the sixteenth century, Ndongo's own independence was only partial. As late as 1520, the kingdom was still partly subordinate to Kongo - part of a wider pattern in which Kongo's own hegemony reached south along the coast well beyond its own core provinces. Ndongo's rulers bore the title ngola, a word Portuguese sailors would later mangle into the name of the entire region: Angola.

A title that outlived the kingdom that coined it

The kings who held that title left almost no trace in written sources before the middle of the sixteenth century, when the first Portuguese expeditions began working their way down the coast south of Kongo. What would make Ndongo's own name famous, in the end, was not the kingdom's founding or its early independence from Kongo, but the war of conquest it would spend most of the following century fighting - one that outlasted the kingdom's own sovereignty by several decades, carried forward by a queen who refused to accept that the war had already been lost.

A cold welcome at Kabasa

expansionDrafted from UNESCO Series on Women in African History (2014)

In 1560, after a long voyage down the coast, the Portuguese explorer Paulo Dias de Novais landed near the mouth of the Kwanza River and asked to be presented to the King of Ndongo. He and his party of Jesuits, traders and Portuguese dignitaries were brought inland to Kabasa, the kingdom's capital, and presented to Ngola Kiluanje kia Ndambi - the earliest king of Ndongo any source names, and, though nobody at Kabasa could have known it that year, the great-grandfather of the woman who would carry the kingdom's name farther than any of them.

Trade offered, suspicion returned

Dias de Novais announced that he had come on behalf of the Portuguese Crown to open trade and offer the benefit of missionary knowledge. Ngola Kiluanje kia Ndambi was not persuaded by the gifts the mission brought, and answered coldly: the Portuguese could stay and see the capital, but they would be watched, and would not be permitted to leave without his own authorization. During their stay, the visitors took the measure of a society they found hierarchical and well-organized, skilled in trade, metalworking, animal husbandry and agriculture - and quietly searched for the gold and silver deposits the Portuguese Crown coveted for its own mint, without success.

A condition attached to leaving

Five years later, the king allowed Dias de Novais to return to Portugal - but only on condition that he come back at the head of an army, to help Ndongo fight its own regional rivals. It was a request made in good faith, treating the Portuguese as a potential ally against Ndongo's own enemies rather than as a threat in themselves. Ten years after that, in 1575, Dias de Novais did return at the head of a fleet of armed caravans - not to honor the alliance he had been asked for, but to conquer the country in the Portuguese Crown's own name.

A promise answered with an invasion

contractionDrafted from (ed.), General History of Africa, Volume V: Africa from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Century (1992)

Paulo Dias de Novais came back to Ndongo in 1575 with a fleet of soldiers, not the allied army he had been asked for a decade earlier. Ndongo's own people, caught unprepared by a mission they had every reason to expect was friendly, defended their homeland but were beaten back by superior Portuguese firepower. The Portuguese seized the whole coastal strip in a single rapid campaign, renamed it Angola after Ndongo's own royal title, and founded a new port there that same year: São Paulo da Assunção de Loanda, known ever after simply as Luanda.

(ed.), General History of Africa, Volume V: Africa from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Century (1992) · Erik Cleves Kristensen · CC BY 2.0

A colony built to feed a different kind of demand

The gold and silver the Portuguese Crown had hoped to find during Dias de Novais's earlier stay at Kabasa never materialized. Deprived of the mineral wealth that had justified the colony in the first place, Luanda's founders turned instead to a trade Ndongo's own territory could supply in abundance: captives, sold in large numbers to labor on Portugal's plantations in Brazil. Every subsequent stage of the war against Ndongo would be driven as much by the demand for slaves to fill Luanda's own export quotas as by any remaining ambition to find precious metal at all.

A border that only moved one way

Portuguese migrants - missionaries, farmers, merchants and independent adventurers alike - poured into the new colony behind the soldiers, taking land as they found it. Ndongo's own borders contracted steadily eastward under the pressure, a war that had begun as a betrayed alliance settling into a slow, grinding annexation that would not stop until the kingdom itself was gone.

Allies who came to plunder

contractionDrafted from (ed.), General History of Africa, Volume V: Africa from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Century (1992)

Nearly four decades into the war, Portugal was still struggling to translate its coastal foothold into control of Ndongo's own interior. What finally tipped the balance was not a Portuguese army at all, but an alliance struck in 1612 with the Mbangala - nomadic warrior bands, called Jaga by the same sources that used the name for the invaders of Kongo two generations earlier, who had been living in the region by pillage since before 1600. With Mbangala fighters, and especially those under a leader named Kasanje, doing much of the actual fighting, the Portuguese occupied a large part of Ndongo between 1617 and 1621.

A country laid waste by its own war

Ndongo's king fled east ahead of the advance, and the Mbangala allies did not spare the country they had helped conquer - they sacked it as thoroughly as any enemy, leaving the land devastated behind them. Even the slave trade that had driven so much of the preceding decades of warfare came to a standstill amid the destruction, and famine spread through a kingdom that could no longer feed itself while fighting off a war on this scale.

Peace bought at a price already too high

By 1622 the devastation had become severe enough that both sides needed a settlement, and a peace treaty was concluded the following year. Ndongo's own king had lost the ability to negotiate that peace directly. It was his sister who represented the kingdom instead, sent to Luanda as an envoy - and the diplomatic performance she gave there would make her a far more consequential figure to Ndongo's own future than the treaty itself turned out to be.

The chair she was not offered

aside?What aside meansDrafted from UNESCO Series on Women in African History (2014)

Nzinga Mbandi arrived in Luanda in 1622 as her brother's envoy, sent to negotiate an end to a war that had already ruined the country. She was, by then, already unusually prepared for the task: taught to read and write by Portuguese missionaries and merchants who had passed through Ndongo since her own childhood, and fluent enough in Portuguese to deal with the colony's governor directly, in his own language, without an intermediary.

UNESCO Series on Women in African History (2014) · Giovanni Antonio Cavazzi · Public domain

A seat claimed rather than given

When she entered the reception room for her audience with Governor João Correia de Sousa, no chair had been provided for her - a deliberate slight, meant to seat the Portuguese governor above a mere envoy from a defeated kingdom. Nzinga's response, recorded by the Italian missionary Giovanni Antonio Cavazzi and repeated by nearly every writer on her life since, was to order one of her own attendants to kneel on all fours and serve as her chair. The governor had offered her no seat of honor. She supplied her own, and negotiated the peace from it as an equal rather than a supplicant.

An education put to use against the people who gave it

The peace Nzinga negotiated at that meeting did not survive her brother's own death two years later, and the war she would spend the next four decades fighting drew directly on what her time among Portuguese missionaries had taught her - not just the language, but a working understanding of how the colony's own governors thought and negotiated. She would go on to send spies regularly into Luanda to track troop movements and study Portuguese fighting methods, training her own forces in the tactics she had learned about from the very people she was fighting. The gesture with the chair, more than thirty years before her death, was the first public sign of a mind the Portuguese Crown would never manage to outmaneuver.

A throne held for two years

contractionDrafted from UNESCO Series on Women in African History (2014)

Ngola Mbandi, the king Nzinga had represented at Luanda in 1622, never matched his own father's authority or his sister's evident intelligence, and the years after the peace treaty did not go well for him. Fearing a plot from within his own circle, he had Nzinga's only son - a small child - put to death, a decision that cost him his sister's trust without buying him any lasting security. In 1624 Ngola Mbandi himself died, by some accounts murdered and by others a suicide, and Nzinga took power, first as regent and then, in 1626, as queen in her own right.

A war that never paused for the succession

The Mbangala leader Kasanje was still occupying the richest part of Ndongo's own territory when Nzinga took the throne, and Portugal, rather than treat the new queen as a partner for the peace her own diplomacy had once secured, moved instead to unseat her. War broke out again in 1626, against Nzinga's own government and against Kasanje both, and this time Portugal did not stop at reoccupying territory - it moved to install a rival ruler of its own choosing in Nzinga's place.

Driven out, not defeated

Within three years, the Portuguese-backed rival held Kabasa and the Ndongo throne Nzinga's own family had ruled from for at least three generations. Nzinga herself was not captured and did not surrender. She withdrew instead into the neighboring Kingdom of Matamba, conquered it, and built there a new base from which to keep fighting a war Portugal believed, at that point, it had already won. She never accepted the loss. For the rest of her life she signed her own letters and treaties as Queen of Ndongo and Matamba both - a title claiming a throne she no longer held in a kingdom that, from that point on, no longer had a Ndongo dynasty ruling it at all.

Sixteen princes sent across the ocean

endDrafted from Lara, Revista de História (São Paulo), no. 175 (2016)

Nzinga's death in 1663 did not end the war her own family had fought for nearly a century. It removed the one figure Portugal had never managed to defeat, and within a decade the remaining Ngola - Dom João Hari, ruling what was left of the old kingdom from the fortified heights of Pungo Andongo - found himself facing the same colonial power alone.

A nine-month siege

Portuguese forces under Luís Lopes de Sequeira laid siege to Pungo Andongo in 1671. The stronghold held out for months before the position finally collapsed. Dom João Hari fled to the neighboring territory of Libolo, was captured there, and was beheaded rather than kept alive - a precaution, by the Portuguese governor's own reasoning, against the risk that allies might free him if he were held prisoner instead. A Portuguese fort went up on the captured heights, and what remained of an independent Ndongo state ended with it.

Lara, Revista de História (São Paulo), no. 175 (2016) · Paulo César Santos · CC0

Sixteen princes, and nowhere safe to put them

The dead king was not the only member of the royal line the Portuguese now held. Roughly sixteen descendants of an earlier Ndongo king, Dom Filipe I, were taken prisoner in the campaign's aftermath - not enslaved outright, like most of the war's other captives, but deported across the Atlantic under guard. They reached Brazil first, then were shipped on to Lisbon by 1673. The reasoning was explicitly political rather than punitive: Portuguese authorities judged that princes with a hereditary claim to Ndongo were too dangerous to leave in Angola, where they might rally a rebellion, or even in Brazil, where the colonial government feared they could make common cause with the maroon community at Palmares. In Portugal they were dispersed among convents around the country, held as prisoners while being given a religious and Portuguese education - a captivity that kept them alive, and kept them permanently apart from the kingdom their blood still had a claim to.

Ninety-six years after a Portuguese fleet first arrived at Ndongo's own coast promising trade, the war that followed ended not with a treaty or a line of succession but with a captured fortress, a beheaded king, and a scattering of princes locked into convent cells an ocean away from the throne they were born to.

The double queen

afterlifeDrafted from UNESCO Series on Women in African History (2014)

Exiled from the kingdom her own family had ruled, Nzinga spent the next thirty-seven years fighting a war she had, by any ordinary measure, already lost - and came closer to reversing it than anyone in Luanda expected a deposed queen ruling from a neighboring kingdom to manage.

Alliances built out of a losing position

She forged strategic partnerships with Kongo, with the Kassanje and Kissama peoples, and, once the Dutch seized Luanda from Portugal in 1641, with the Dutch Republic itself - the same pattern of playing European rivals against each other that Kongo's own king Garcia II pursued at exactly the same moment, against exactly the same colonial power. Her army fought a pitched battle against twenty thousand Portuguese soldiers at Kavangaem in the 1640s and won a further victory at Ilamba, and she authorized her own slave trade between Matamba and Luanda to fund the decades of warfare her resistance required - the same trade her ancestors in Ndongo had fought a war against Portugal to control, now run on her own terms from a kingdom that was not, strictly, the one she had been born to rule.

Outlasting the men sent to defeat her

Portuguese governor after Portuguese governor arrived determined to finish the war Nzinga's own exile was supposed to have already ended, and each in turn found her impossible to capture, outmaneuver, or intimidate into surrender. When Governor Salvador Correia de Sá arrived to find her still in the field and still commanding real loyalty past the age of seventy, he concluded there was nothing left to do against a sovereign of her reputation. On 24 November 1657, the Portuguese Crown formally renounced its own claim to rule in her place, in a treaty ratified in Lisbon - not a restoration of the kingdom she had lost in 1626, but the closest acknowledgment Portugal ever made that the queen it had spent three decades trying to remove could not be removed by force.

A name that outlived the throne it named

Nzinga died on 17 December 1663, at the age of eighty-two, having ruled Matamba and claimed Ndongo for thirty-seven years without ever setting foot in Kabasa as its queen again. Ndongo's own remaining territory, whatever of it still answered to a Ngola after her death, fell to Portugal for good in 1671. Matamba, the kingdom she had actually built her long resistance from, endured under her own successors for generations afterward. Of the two crowns she claimed until her last day, the one she was born to inherit was the one that did not survive her - and the one she had to conquer for herself was the one that did.

UNESCO Series on Women in African History (2014) · after Giovanni Antonio Cavazzi · Public domain

A figure claimed on three continents

aside?What aside meansDrafted from UNESCO Series on Women in African History (2014)

Few rulers of any early modern African kingdom have been claimed, redrawn and reinterpreted by as many different traditions after their death as Nzinga Mbandi. Her name itself survives in a dozen or more spellings across the sources - Njinga, Nzinga, Jinga, Singa, Zhinga, Ginga and others - partly an accident of transcribing Kimbundu into Portuguese and partly a product of the Queen's own habit of signing her correspondence differently depending on who she was addressing.

A queen reimagined for two centuries of readers

The Italian missionary Giovanni Antonio Cavazzi's own 1687 account of her 1622 meeting with Governor Correia de Sousa - the meeting where she famously supplied her own chair rather than accept none - became the founding image for everything written about her afterward. In 1769 the French writer Jean-Louis Castilhon turned her into the subject of the first anti-colonial historical novel written about Africa, and in 1830 the French illustrator Achille Devéria produced an imagined portrait of her that Europe subsequently treated, with no better evidence behind it than an artist's own imagination, as her official likeness.

An icon claimed by an independence movement she never knew

Twentieth-century Angola picked up her memory for a very different purpose than any nineteenth-century novelist had. Nationalist leaders of the Angolan war of liberation invoked her explicitly as a symbol of resistance, and when independence was finally proclaimed in 1975, a statue of Nzinga was raised in Luanda - the city her own great-grandfather had once received Portuguese visitors near, and the city her own kingdom fought a century-long war never to lose control of.

UNESCO Series on Women in African History (2014) · Erik Cleves Kristensen · CC BY 2.0

A presence beyond Angola's own borders

Her memory did not stop at Angola. In Brazil, where many of her own former soldiers were shipped as slaves after her death, she is honored in the Congada processions that blend African and European tradition, and portrayed in Candomblé as a warrior spirit called Matamba, after the kingdom she built her resistance from. In Haiti, a variant of vodou represents her among its own spirits. Across three continents and four centuries, the queen who spent her own reign refusing to accept that Ndongo's throne was lost has been remembered, again and again, as proof that it does not have to stay that way.