Long Live the Queens

Again according to Fuller (and by this time Nzinga would have been well over sixty), she kept fifty or sixty men in a harem, who were allowed wives but any infants who were conceived had to be killed. Similarly, it was said that she selected some of her favourites of these men to dress in women’s clothes. The story obviously titillated the nineteenth-century French nobleman the Marquis de Sade, who revived the tale in his Philosophy in the Boudoir, claiming that Nzinga immolated each lover after a night together.

In 1856, Nzinga negotiated peace with the Portuguese, exchanging 130 slaves for the return of her still-captive sister, Mukumbu. In return, the Portuguese established a Christian mission in Matamba and the Jaga were forced to abandon their practice of infanticide. Nzinga herself reconverted to Christianity and focused on developing Matamba as a trading power, making the most of its position as the gateway to the interior of Central Africa. Despite many attempts by the Portuguese and their allies to dethrone or kill Queen Nzinga, she died peacefully at the age of eighty in 1663, leaving Matamba a strong commercial state.

Queen Nzinga proved to be a constant thorn in the side of the Portuguese and one of Africa’s most successful, feared and respected leaders. The respect she earned lasted through the centuries, so much so that one America writer, in promoting the emancipation of the slaves, wrote in 1833: ‘History furnishes very few instances of bravery, intelligence and perseverance equal to the famous Zhinga, the queen of Angola.’

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