Hey everyone,
I have wanted to cover Njinga of Ndongo and Matamba since I first heard of her in the autumn of 2023. Her story is so fascinating, yet it’s a tale that is not often told. I’m excited to be telling it today.
Right here at the top, I want to put in a content warning: I’m going to be mentioning cannibalism, self-harm, violence against children, enslavement, and general warfare. If that’s not your speed, you might want to skip this one.
🎙️ Transcript
I’ve mentioned before on the podcast that warrior women have something of a reputation as myths and fantasy, but the story of Njinga proves that not only can women fight, we can rule kingdoms. In the 17th century, Njinga resisted Portuguese colonization of her homeland, Ndongo, and her story is a brilliant one of resilience, commitment, and power.
Hey everyone, welcome to Unruly Figures, the podcast that celebrates history’s greatest rule-breakers. I’m your host, Valorie Castellanos Clark, and today I’m covering the tale of Njinga of Ndongo and Matamba, a warrior queen who resisted Portuguese colonization for decades.
Before we jump into this tale of colonial resistance, I first have to thank all the paying subscribers on Substack whose patronage helps me make this podcast possible. If you like this show and want more of it, please become a paying subscriber over on Substack! When you’re ready to do that, head over to unrulyfigures.substack.com
I also want to put in a content warning right at the top: In this episode, I’m going to be mentioning cannibalism, self-harm, violence against children, enslavement, and general warfare. If that’s not your speed, you might want to skip this one. I’ve relied pretty heavily on the only biography of Njinga, Njinga of Angola: Africa’s Warrior Queen by Dr. 1Linda M. Heywood, and if you want more details of the actual warfare, which I’ll skip over a lot of in this episode, you should check out Heywood’s book.
All right, let’s hop into it.
Njinga was born in 1582, the oldest daughter of the favorite concubine of the king of Ndongo, Mbande a Ngola. This—Ngola—is actually the title that the name Angola comes, and you’ll probably hear it a lot throughout the episode. Now, Njinga was born breech, or feet first, and her umbilical cord was wrapped around her neck. The Mbundu believed that a baby born this way, which they considered unnatural, would not live a normal life.1 The nature of the birth dictated the character of the adult, which is why her father named her Njinga, from the root word kujinga, meaning “to twist, to turn, to wrap.”2 The belief that she would be unique turned out to be prescient.
The kingdom was a young one—it had emerged and been formally established earlier in the 16th century, in 1515. In the 16th century, Ndongo was the second-largest state in central Africa, about 1/3 the size of Kongo. As with many places, travel between population centers in Ndongo could be treacherous, but the economy relied on good traveling between local, regional, and eventually international markets. The people of Ndongo were fierce warriors and still practiced traditional religions, including ancestor worship and a belief that their ruler was divinely anointed by their gods. They practiced slavery, as several African kingdoms did, but I want to stress that it was a very different form of slavery than the racially based slavery practiced by Europeans and Americans around the same time as our story today.
Importantly, women played a vital role in the kingdom. Though Ndongo hadn’t had a female ruler in its short history, women were still powerful in the kingdom. There was only one king and one chief wife but often several concubines and any of their children could inherit the throne, with some exceptions. Importantly, women were free to leave a marriage that no longer suited them and leaving didn’t incur any shame or other negative impact within the society.3
When Njinga was born, things were relatively stable—her father was in line for the throne that her grandfather, Kasenda, still sat on. Trouble was actively coming though. The Portuguese had already arrived on their coast, however, establishing a stronghold on the island of Luanda in 1560. The Portuguese visitors were allowed to remain, but their way of life posed a problem to rulers of Ndongo—Catholicism necessarily undermined the spiritual power of Ndongo rulers, and the arrival of European-style weapons changed the balance of power between rulers and ruled.4 In 1575, fears of why the Portuguese were really there came to fruition: A man named Dias de Navois arrived from Portugal to Ndongo already bearing the title “Captain-General of the Conquered Kingdom of Angola.” Ndongo, of course, had not yet been conquered, but his mission was clear.
To spare us every gory detail, let’s just say that this is where decades of warfare began. The fighting was brutal and Ndongo sustained heavy losses for a lot of it: In a single battle in 1583, Njinga’s grandfather King Kasenda supposedly lost 40,000 men while the Portuguese lost 7.5 Not only were they trying to conquer the kingdom but they were slave-raiding, and what had begun as a side-effect of the war became the very point of the war as Portguese plantations were being developed abroad. Between 1575 and the 1590s, the Portuguese alone exported as many as 50,000 Mbundus from Ndongo to Brazil.6 By the time Kasenda died in 1592, he had lost control of a lot of land and the loyalty of many local leaders.
So this is the world Njinga was being raised in—a kingdom in crisis. The royal court had to evacuate numerous times while she was a child, but they survived. It was well known that Njinga was her father’s favorite, and much like Hatshepsut, she was often at his side in the throne room and present for political work. This was against convention—rulers ran the risk of alienating powerful branches of their large families when they openly favored the child of a particular wife or concubine, but Mbande a Ngola “flouted convention” in this way.7 She apparently outshone her full brother, Ngola Mbande, both in mental prowess and in fighting with the battle axe, which was the royal symbol of the kingdom.
While her father sat on the throne, Njinga led something of a charmed life. I mean, there was ongoing warfare, and she got a good education by accompanying her father during his work, but otherwise, she was a princess with privileges. We know she was sexually active and took lovers; in fact, she’s described as having a group of male concubines much like her father’s group of female concubines. She gave birth to a son in 1617 or 1618 when she was in her late 30s; if she had other children before this, they didn’t survive long enough to make it into the historical record.
I mentioned Njinga’s brother Ngola Mbande already. They also had two sisters: Funji and Kambu. The four of them were the children of the king’s favorite concubine; it’s unclear if he had a chief wife and what became of any children she may have had. But in 1617, when her father was murdered in conflict, there was a blood bath as people fought for power. For those familiar with English history, the ensuing conflict gives War of the Roses vibes, with different branches of the family fighting for control of the kingdom. Njinga’s brother Ngola Mbande ended up winning, and he “unleashed a bloodbath against potential rivals” to maintain his hold.8 Some accounts actually accuse Ngola Mbande of murdering his own father to take the throne, so this bloodbath may not be a huge surprise.9 In addition to killing his half-brothers, who represented the most obvious competing claims, he violently lashed out at their mothers, their aunts, and then at prominent members of the court. He did not kill his own sisters, but his long-standing rivalry with Njinga could not be ignored. He seized her infant son and killed him, then ordered the forced sterilization of her and their sisters, Funji and Kambu.
Njinga’s biographer, Dr. Heywood, quotes a report saying that he ordered that herbs be thrown “while boiling onto the bellies of his sisters, so that, from the shock, fear & pain, they should forever be unable to give birth.”10 Now, last I heard, throwing herbs at someone isn’t enough to render them unable to give birth, so I feel like there’s something else at play here. Maybe some details were left out, maybe the writer of the report was deliberately vague. We know that neither Njinga nor her sisters had any more children after this, so something happened, but to my mind, there are other possibilities. First, it could have just been a combination of age and stress. At 35 years old, Njinga wasn’t too old to carry a pregnancy to term by any means, but as we’ll see the next several years of her life were very stressful and that’s never good for a pregnancy. Also, we know that the Mbundu people had the means to abort a fetus, so it could be a case of her choosing to abort instead of giving birth to another child her brother would murder.
Furious with their brother, and their own safety under threat, the sisters moved to Matamba, east of Ndongo. This is another point that makes me think that sterilization isn’t quite the story we think—we don’t know much of what Njinga was doing for five years. While in Matamba, she could have given birth to children that simply didn’t survive to make it into the historical record.
Meanwhile, Ngola Mbande married and had a son to secure his own line of succession. He continued his father’s war with the Portugeuse, besieging a fort and attacking Portuguese allies. Nearly as bad as the Portuguese incursions were the people who allied with them—the Imbangala were “mercenary bands of young mean known for their violent and cultlike behavior (including cannibalism) […and] had aleady invaded territories south of Ndongo.”11 These men were a constant problem for the kingdom because they were extremely fierce warriors.
Ngola Mbande was losing his war. Between 1617 and 1621, just four years, the Portuguese captured more than 55,000 Mbundu people and sent them to be enslaved in the Americas. So in 1621, Mbande forged an alliance with an Imbangala leader named Kasanje, who had been on the Portuguese side but had become disenchanted with the colonial power. Mbande sent his son to live with Kasanje to learn to fight, but he knew he needed to pursue diplomatic avenues as well.
Despite murdering his nephew, he recalled Njinga from Matamba and had her take on a diplomatic role in October 1621, when Portugal sent a new governor to Luanda: João de Sousa. He knew she had never forgiven him, but he also knew “she harbored political ambitions, had a loyal following among some important factions in Ndongo, and, like him, was intent on rebuilding Ndongo and limiting further Portguese advance.”12 They put together an impressive delegation with a military escort, musicians, pages and handmaidens, and enslaved people who would be gifts to the governor. She was authorized to negotiate on Ngola Mbande’s behalf—and especially to undertake a public baptism into Catholicism if she believed it would be an advantage.13 Similarly, the Portuguese received her with pomp and ceremony, indicating that they regarded Ngola Mbande as a major power player whose envoy deserved the same respect as any ambassador.
Well—sort of. They may have regarded Ngola Mbande and therefore Njinga as power players in the region, but they still wanted to subordinate them in order to take their land. The Portuguese still wanted to win. So when Njinga arrived for an audience with the Portuguese governor, she found that they had not set out chairs for the African delegation. The governor sat on a “chair covered with velvet embroidered with gold,” but they had set out velvet mats on the floor for Njinga and her entourage. It was a way to force subordination, which they had made a habit of doing with conquered African kingdoms.14
Well, Njinga refused to lower herself. When she entered the room, “without pause” she signaled to a female attendant to kneel on hands and knees; Njinga sat on her back for all the long hours of negotiation.15 When they eventually got up to move to another room, Njinga left the female attendant there. The governor pointed it out and Njinga explained that she was too high status to cart a chair from room to room when she had others like it; the Portuguese governor did not expect to sit on the same chair everywhere he went, and neither did she.16
Throughout negotiations in Luanda, Njinga refused to wear Portuguese clothing, instead highlighting Mbundu fashion—she was covered in “priceless jewels” every day.17 Even after she did eventually accept baptism by Father Antonio Cavazzi in 1622, she continued to wear Mbundu fashion.
She also held out against demands from the Portuguese, especially their demand that her brother should pay an annual tribute to the King of Portugal in slaves. She argued that such a tribute could only be imposed on a conquered kingdom, but Ndongo was not conquered. “He was a sovereign king who had voluntarily sought friendship with another sovereign,” and would be treated as an equal.18
When Njinga returned to her brother’s capital in the autumn of 1622, she was triumphant. Not only had she agreed to terms with the Portuguese, but their friendship was in a good enough place that they had agreed to help dislodge the powerful Imbangala guerilla fighters who were terrorizing Ndongo. They also privately promised peace with Matamba, where her power was centralized, even if peace couldn’t be achieved with her brother. Continued peace hinged on her brother’s baptism, so he began learning the catechism from a Portuguese missionary. Peace seemed possible.
At first. Over time, Ngola Mbande began to believe that the political costs of baptism outweighed the peaceful benefits. He might get peace with the Portuguese, but he might also lose his throne—remember, for the Mbundu people, there was a spiritual and religious element to kingship. Plus, his people respected him precisely because he resisted the Portuguese; becoming Catholic would look like aligning with them. It’s also possible that Njinga was whispering in his ear to not move forward; according to Heywood’s biography, Njinga may have “feared that Ngola Mbande’s own baptism would jeopardize her hard-won special status” as the baptized potential ruler of Ndongo.19
Here is where portrayals of Njinga really divide. To some, she was a rising influence while her brother floundered, unable to adapt. To others, Njinga was the reason her brother couldn’t adapt; she undermined him, made him depressed and frustrated. When he died in the spring of 1624, everyone knew it was because of poison. But had he taken the poison himself, making his death a suicide, or had Njinga given it to him, making her a murderer?
It’s unclear. A Portuguese chronicler wrote that Njinga “helped him to die with the aid of a poisoned drink.”20 Was this murder, or perhaps euthanasia? It’s possible Mbande was sick or injured and in pain, not healing. Interpretation hinges on “helped him to die;” a strange and vague phrase. Of course, the chronicler could have just been wrong and Njinga had nothing to do with it.
In any case, she stepped up and took power. One of her first acts was to organize an elaborate funeral for her brother that signalled to her new followers that she understood Mbundu traditions and the role of the king. She respectfully removed several bones from his corpse and arranged them in a portable reliquary chest.21 European chroniclers acted very scandalized by this in the 1620s, but this veneration of remains is so similar to Roman Catholic practices of enshrining the remains of saints that I have a hard time interpreting their horror as anything more than racism and performative virtue signalling.
Her next act was to either seduce or marry the Imbangala leader, Kasanje, who had her brother’s son in his care. Once that relationship was locked in, she murdered her nephew, getting her full revenge for her brother’s murder of her own son. I don’t know if Mbundu culture has a phrase equal to “an eye for an eye,” but the principle holds here. And while it is horrifying to kill a child, it is not unique—the Princes in the Tower are a good example of how this sort of power consolidation happens on every continent. She also murdered several other relatives, causing some supporters to flee, but many of the Mbundu people stayed loyal to her—like rulers before her, she demanded absolute deference and subordination.
Once she was in power, Njinga’s main goal was to recreate the powerful Ndongo of her childhood, when her grandfather had been in control and the country had been powerful. It would be overly simplistic to say only that Njinga spent the next 40 years trying to “reassert Ndongo hegemony and limit Portuguese power” and leave it at that—but that is an accurate summary of what happened.22 She tried everything in her arsenal, from diplomacy, to war, to capitalistic alliances, to war and diplomacy again. To be honest, I found it confusing to read about every individual move she made so I’m not going to go over them—we’d be here for hours, anyway—but Dr. Heywood has been able to document the many twists and turns of her attempts to consolidate Ndongo independence over the years. If you want to read in more detail, I really recommend her biography: Njinga of Angola: Africa’s Warrior Queen.
One of her more interesting strategies was trying to bring in Catholicism on her terms—as early as 1624, she was inviting Jesuit missionaries to Ndongo so she could oversee the spread of Catholicism. The Portuguese governor and missions, of course, had their own ideas so it didn’t work out, but it’s an example of the creative ways she was thinking about this.
Seeing that she was not going to simply bend to their will, the Portuguese took a very different tack. One of the Portuguese ideas for domination of Ndongo was to install their own leader. They waged a furious war, pushing Njinga out of the main territories of Ndongo, and installing Ngola Hari as the new puppet king. Though he was born of a noble lineage, his mother was a slave —this is the one exception to inheriting the throne that I mentioned earlier. Ngola Mbande and Njinga’s mother was not a slave, which is why they were eligible to rule even though they weren’t “legimitate” children of the king in the way that Westerners understand legitimate offspring. As the child of an enslaved woman, Ngola Hari was not a slave himself but he was also ineligible to ascend to the throne; both Njinga and her sister Kambu regarded him as a dependent half-brother.23 At the same time, the Portuguese governor first introduced the argument that Njinga’s gender disqualified her from rulership. He put a contract on her head to ensure his puppet would stay in place.
While that was going on in the capital, Njinga’s flight from the Portuguese was actually making her more popular. Skipping through lands to evade capture, she managed to convince local rulers and neighboring kingdoms to keep her location secret and even join her cause against the Portuguese. Descriptions of her popularity and flight remind me of folk hero stories and Wild West outlaws, except she was the legitimate ruler. And how could they not?
For example, during one of these flights from the powerful Portuguese military, in May 1629, Njinga couldn’t shake off her pursuers until they entered the rugged landscape of a remote region more or less unknown to outsiders. She escaped by running to a rocky precipice—the entrance of which could only be reached by crossing a gully so treacherous that many Portuguese soldiers fell to their deaths trying to catch up. The ones that did found that the precipice could only be accessed by passing through an entrance so small that only one person could crawl through it at a time. Just a few days later, the soldiers began to catch up at another narrow precipice and Njinga decided to save herself by grabbing a thick vine and descending down a steep ravine to where her allies waited below. She landed without a scratch on her. Remember, she is nearly 50, pulling this kind of Indiana Jones action while being shot at by the Portuguese military.
If at this point you’re wondering how on earth there isn’t a movie about this woman yet, there is a documentary tv show on Netflix about her, called African Queens and narrated by Jada Pinkett Smith. As of 2021, there was also a drama series in pre-production with Starz, helmed by Curtis Jackson, aka 50 Cent. But I haven’t seen any updates about it lately and it’s nowhere on IMDb.
Over the years, Njinga’s power waxed and waned based on other issues around Ndongo and with the Portuguese’s own power. Eventually, Ngola Hari, the puppet king of the Portuguese, and Njinga had to face each other—I mean, he might have been a puppet king but he was also a usurper. Njinga waged psychological warfare on this distant relative, sending him threatening messages and fetishes that terrified him. He “could neither confront Njinga nor muster the courage to lead his forces across Ndongo to show that he was in charge. Instead…he sent messages urging the Portuguese for reinforcements to ‘protect him from the black woman.’”24
Eventually, the Portuguese managed to capture and imprison her sisters. The two women were paraded through the city naked and humiliated in front of the Portuguese governor. They underwent “months of intense brainwashing” before agreeing to be baptized.25 Their captivity was used as leverage against Njinga, though during their long imprisonment they managed to spy on the Portuguese for their sister, passing information through a confessor who visited them after they converted to Catholicism.
In the 1630s, Njinga allied herself with the Imbangala, seeking out the man she’d seduced or married then abandoned in order to kill her nephew. Her attempts at honoring her own Catholic conversion and using that as part of her foundational relationship with the Portuguese hadn’t worked, so she switched again, leveraging the reputation of the fearsome Imbangala to gain power and support against the Portuguese. She combined Imbangala practices with Mbundu traditions, “creating a new ideology that relied on the invesion of gender categories and new religious and secular rites.”26 She so devoted herself to learning their traditions and customs that she became an Imbangala leader in her own right.
It is worth noting that some of the accounts of Imbangala practices can be extremely gruesome. They include rape, cannibalism, and the forced murder of children by their own mothers. But because the Imbangala never formed a nation-state, with a capital where their own records could be kept, these stories are largely drawn from the records of their enemies, who are inclined to portray them in a negative light. While it’s true that cultures across time have practiced cannibalism and the Imbangala may very well be on that list, the stories that Njinga became Imbangala by killing an infant and grinding him into a paste or an oil that she wore on her skin seems… like the stuff of horror films—that is, it sounds sort of made up.
As an Imbangala leader, she led forces into Matamba, where she had once lived and had many supporters. As she made her way toward the capital, her forces grew, and she was able to easily unseat their sovereign Queen Muongo, capturing her and her daughter. She banished the queen, but the woman died soon after, and her daughter—also named Muongo—was raised alongside Njinga. Though the biography doesn’t explore this relationship much, it almost sounds like Muongo was an adopted daughter, and she stayed at Njinga’s side for the rest of her life.27
Conquering Matamba—earning the Queen of Matamba part of her title—was crucial to her following success. Not only was it a base of operations for her, but it was a perfect launching point for her continued attempts to reconquer Ndongo. Soon after, she began to gain a reputation of invincibility, a repuation helped by the fact that she seemed to go from one victorious campaign to the next, quickly reconquering lands the Portuguese had taken.
Possibly to solidify her rulership, she decided to have her inner circle and followers start referring to her as a man and a king, not a woman and a queen. She married a man, Ngola Ntombo, and insisted that he dress as a woman and be referred to as female and a queen. She also recruited more male concubines and female bodyguards, then put them all in the same uniform.28 It was a fascinating inversion of gender, but because she prescribed it to so many people—and seems to have gone back to referring to herself as a female queen not long after—I hesitate to use masculine or gender-neutral pronouns for her or refer to her as trans in a modern sense. There’s some debate about this: Her biographer, Dr. Heywood, used she/her pronouns, but another historian, Dr. Daniel F. Silva, in an episode of You’re Dead to Me used they/them starting at this point in the story. But that’s also putting a very modern construction on someone who lived 400 years ago. So, you know, maybe this will change in coming years, but I wanted to bring it up. I’ll keep referring to Njinga as a woman since she seems to have gone back to doing the same.
A surprising turn in the saga came when the Dutch arrived on the coast of Ndongo on April 20, 1641 and decided to ally themselves with Njinga instead of the Portuguese. Their agreement promised support on both sides in their joint attempt to “exterminate the Portuguese.”29 It’s clear from the terms of the agreement that the Dutch regarded Njinga as an equal.30 With them, she was able to build up a pan-central African alliance. Friendship was possible largely because the Dutch did not want territory, they wanted access to a market with a steady supply of slaves, which Njinga and other African leaders could supply. This alliance was not entirely solid though—some Dutch officials worried that Njinga would only use them to drive the Portuguese out then turn around and do the same to them.31 This seems completely possible.
War continued, now with Dutch resources. Resentment of the Portuguese grew, if possible, throughout the 1640s, which made it possible for Njinga to continue her warfare against her usurping family member, Ngola Hari. However, after a decade of successes, Njinga experienced a devastating loss, even with her Dutch allies at her side. She managed to flee but had to leave nearly all her possessions behind. Her sister Kambu, who had escaped Portuguese captivity, was recaptured and sexually abused by her captors until the governor realized who she was and extended some protection to her.32 The Portuguese soldiers had also found letters sent to Njinga by her other sister, Funji, who had been spying on the Portuguese while being held captive for over fifteen years. Funji was executed soon after, sometime in 1647.
Throughout September and October of 1647, Njinga and her African and Dutch allies prepared for an attack on the Portuguese. Their initial fighting went well—thousands of Portuguese troops were killed and they were storming land long ago taken by the Portuguese. By August of the next year they appeared “unstoppable.”33 It looked like they might finally reconquer Ndongo—but then the Portuguese sent a new ambassador with a strong armada. Unable to reach Njinga in the field, she didn’t learn that the Dutch had given up and sued for peace, abandoning their fort in Luanda until she marched her troops there in time to see their ships sailing away, a Portuguese flag once again flying over the fortress.34
Njinga reformulated her battle strategy but did not give up. The Dutch had left, but instead of going back to try to negotiate with the Portuguese, she went around them to start writing to the pope as a Catholic ruler. She had already began to abandon Imbangala practices and would continue to combine various religious practices and iconography to create an ideology that could appease both her allies and the enemies she was trying to transform into allies. Her troops captured two Spanish Capuchin missionaries, Father Bonaventura de Cordella and Father Francisco de Veas, and used them as her conduit to Rome.
The Spanish Capuchins were key to her rehabilitation with the Catholic Church—they positioned her abandonment of the faith as a result of the “cruelty of the Portuguese [who] had made war against her and dispossessed her of her kingdom.”35 She began to make promises about allowing missionaries back into Matamba and eventually Ndongo if they could support her against the Portuguese. She became devout, praying with the missionaries and participating in Catholic rituals.
A key issue for Njinga became the release of her sister Kambu, who had been baptized with the name Barbara and was living “an exemplary religious life in Luanda during her imprisonment.”36 For Njinga this was a matter of succession—without children, she had no clear successor and thought Kambu would be the best possible successor for the throne. I do wonder what became of Princess Muongo—could she not have been a successor? But Heywood doesn’t tell us why she wasn’t considered. For the missionaries, Kambu’s release was a way of ensuring that Njinga didn’t go back to the Imbangala ways—they thought her sister would be a good influence on her after they had to move on.
Years of negotiations and promises to release Kambu went nowhere. Njinga was balancing her three-pronged approach to regaining Ndongo skillfully by this point. Not only was she still negotiating with the Portuguese governor and exchanging letters with the Pope, but she led out troops for the last time in December 1657, when she was in her 70s.
Nevertheless, a treaty was finally signed on October 12, 1656. It released Kambu and guaranteed that Njinga would not have to pay tribute to Portugal in slaves, which had been a sticking point in their negotiations ever since the 1620s. Ngola Hari was taken off the throne he’d been put on, but he survived only to be “marginalized and humiliated until his death.”37
Njinga was 74 years old when she finally became queen of a peaceful nation. I don’t think anyone would have blamed her for resting on her laurels—and, you know, resting in general. But she spent the last seven years of her life institutionalizing Christianity within the combined kingdom of Ndongo-Matamba and reestablishing the old concepts of nobility that she had grown up under within a Christian framework. She had some success blending Mbundu culture and Christian elements and many people in her kingdom converted.38 Her work was largely to ensure that the center would hold when she eventually died—the kingdom must remain an independent entity for her sister Barbara to rule over.
Her reputation was such by this point that few people openly questioned or opposed her efforts to centralize the new joint Ndongo-Matamba. There were some exceptions, especially during moments of widespread illness, when she allowed traditional practices and rituals to take the forefront over the Christian church she was building in Ndongo. Privately, she had become very close to a Capuchin monk named Father Gaeta, who she relied on in all matters spiritual. When he was transferred to Luanda in 1662 to become head of all the Capuchins in central Africa, she was devastated to lose a trusted friend. He gave her one of his old Capuchin robes, and it’s a sign of her friendship with him and her increasing devotion to Catholicism that she requested to be buried in it.
Njinga died on December 17, 1663, of a lung infection. She was 81 years old. Her sister Kambu—better known in the Anglophone world as Barbara—inherited her throne, as she had planned, but Njinga was not buried in the Capuchin robe as she had hoped. Her followers gave her a traditional Mbundu burial service.
Her story was erased for centuries, and extremely conflicting accounts still exist of who she was and what she did. Her legacy experienced a reclamation and resurgence in popularity during the Angolan Independence Movement in the mid-twentieth century.39 Today, she is considered the Mother of Angola.
That is the story of Njinga, Queen of Ndongo and Matamba! If you liked this story, you will love my book, Unruly Figures: Twenty Tales of Rebels, Rulebreakers, and Revolutionaries You’ve (Probably) Never Heard Of. You can let me know your thoughts about this or any other episode on Substack, TikTok and Instagram, where my username is unrulyfigures. If you’d like to get in touch, send me an email at hello@unrulyfigurespodcast.com. If you have a moment, please give this show a five-star review on Spotify or Apple Podcasts–it does help other folks discover the show.
This podcast is researched, written, and produced by me, Valorie Castellanos Clark. Our music is by Danny Wolf of Wolf & Love. If you are into supporting independent research, please share this with at least one person you know. Heck, start a group chat! Tell them they can subscribe wherever they get their podcasts, but for behind-the-scenes content, come over to unrulyfigures.substack.com.
Until next time, stay unruly.
If you liked this story, you might enjoy the tale of Rani Lakshmi Bai or Princess Alfhild.
📚 Bibliography
Heywood, Linda M. Njinga of Angola: Africa’s Warrior Queen. First Edition. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2017. https://bookshop.org/a/79066/9780674237445.
Kostiw. “Enslaved: Peoples of the Historical Slave Trade.” People of the Historical Slave Trade. Accessed February 18, 2025. https://enslaved.org/fullStory/16-23-102027/".
Kostiw, Nicolette M. “Nbandi, Ana Nzinga ‘Queen Ginga.’” In The Dictionary of Caribbean and Afro-Latin American Biography, edited by Franklin W. Knight and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Oxford University Press, 2016. https://doi.org/10.1093/acref/9780195301731.013.74658.
“Nzinga of Ndongo and Matamba.” In Wikipedia, January 12, 2025. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Nzinga_of_Ndongo_and_Matamba&oldid=1268965055.
White, Peter. “Yetide Badaki To Star In African Warrior Queen Nzinga Drama Series In The Works At Starz From 50 Cent, Mo Abudu & Steven S. DeKnight.” Deadline, December 16, 2021. https://deadline.com/2021/12/queen-nzinga-yetide-badaki-starz-50-cent-1234892198/.
“You’re Dead to Me, Njinga of Ndongo and Matamba.” You’re Dead to Me. BBC 4, August 19, 2022. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0ctwj0p.
Linda M. Heywood, Njinga of Angola: Africa’s Warrior Queen, First Edition (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2017), https://bookshop.org/a/79066/9780674237445.
Heyood, 57
Heywood, 22
Heywood, 22
Heywood, 26
Heywood, 27
Heywood, 57
Heywood, 44
Nicolette M. Kostiw, “Nbandi, Ana Nzinga ‘Queen Ginga,’” in The Dictionary of Caribbean and Afro-Latin American Biography, ed. Franklin W. Knight and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (Oxford University Press, 2016), https://doi.org/10.1093/acref/9780195301731.013.74658.
Heywood, 45
Heywood, 37
Heywood, 50
Heywood, 50
Heywood, 62
Heywood, 62
Heywood, 62
Heywood, 62
Heywood, 51
Heywood, 76
Heywood, 54
Heywood, 76
Heywood, 55
Heywood, 85
Heywood, 101
Heywood, 110
Heywood, 114
Heywood, 126
Heywood, 127
Heywood, 151
Heywood, 151
Heywood, 138
Heywood, 148
Heywood, 155
Heywood, 156
Heywood, 167
Heywood, 171
Heywood, 192
Heywood, 228
“Nzinga of Ndongo and Matamba,” in Wikipedia, January 12, 2025, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Nzinga_of_Ndongo_and_Matamba&oldid=1268965055.
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