Queen Njinga of Ndongo and Matamba: Four Decades Against the Portuguese

Njinga Mbande (also rendered Nzinga), born around 1583, ruled the Central African kingdoms of Ndongo and Matamba, in what is now Angola, through one of the longest sustained campaigns of resistance to European colonization anywhere on the continent. From taking power in Ndongo in 1624 until her death in December 1663, she spent nearly four decades fighting, negotiating with, and outmaneuvering the Portuguese, who had been pushing inland from their coastal base at Luanda since the late 16th century in pursuit of territory and captives for the transatlantic slave trade.

Njinga came to the Ndongo throne after the death of her brother, Ngola Mbande, amid a succession crisis and mounting Portuguese pressure on the kingdom. She initially tried diplomacy, traveling to Luanda in 1622 to negotiate directly with the Portuguese governor: an episode later mythologized in the story that, denied a chair as a mark of respect, she had one of her attendants kneel to serve as her seat, so she would not have to sit on the floor before him. When negotiation failed to check Portuguese expansion and slave-raiding, she turned to war, eventually relocating her base of operations to the neighboring kingdom of Matamba, which she conquered and ruled from 1631 onward while continuing to press her claim to Ndongo.

Her military strategy relied on shifting alliances as much as on her own forces. She allied at various points with the Dutch West India Company, which had seized Luanda from Portugal in 1641, combining Ndongo, Matamba, and Dutch troops against the Portuguese and their African allies. The alliance produced one of her most significant victories: the Battle of Kombi, fought near the Portuguese stronghold of Massangano on October 29, 1647, where the allied force, several thousand strong, including a few hundred Dutch soldiers alongside Njinga’s troops, inflicted heavy losses on a much larger Portuguese-led army, reportedly killing or wounding several thousand of them. The victory did not deliver Massangano itself, and the advantage proved temporary: Portuguese forces under Salvador Correia de Sá retook Luanda in 1648, the Dutch withdrew from Angola, and Njinga fell back to a more defensive strategy from Matamba for the remainder of her reign, continuing to resist Portuguese advances into her sixties.

Njinga died on December 17, 1663, having ruled and fought for close to forty years without Portugal ever fully subduing Matamba during her lifetime. She is remembered as one of the most capable strategists and diplomats to confront European colonial expansion in Africa, someone who used war, alliance-shifting, and personal reinvention, adopting Christianity at points in her political career while retaining traditional religious and political authority, to keep her kingdom independent far longer than most of her neighbors managed. Matamba maintained a measure of autonomy under her successors for decades after her death, and Njinga remains a national symbol in modern Angola.