Born sometime around 1583, Nzinga was a daughter of the soil as she would be referred to in African tradition. And by soil, we mean the Kingdom of Ndongo, in what is known as present-day Angola. Nzinga’s existence was a challenge to several existing norms and traditions, for one, she was born to a slave concubine of the king of Ndongo and second, despite being born into a custom that resisted female rulers — the Mbundu custom, Nzinga would rise to become one of the most powerful rulers in the region, dreaded by the Portuguese.
Nzinga grew up in the kingdom of Ndongo, as one of many children birthed by the ruling Ngola — a title associated with the rulers of Ndongo in that era. Her father was Ngola Kia Samba and her mother was Guenguela Cakomb. As was the tradition, Nzinga’s brother, Mbandi, would become the Ngola after their father and he would rule in Ndongo from 1618 to 1624.
It is, however, important to reveal the status of events in and around Ndongo to provide a better understanding of the events that would later come to be. The Kingdom of Ndongo happened to occupy an area quite close to another powerful and well-established kingdom — Kongo. Kongo was well known for its political might, commerce, and ambition during this era. The latter particularly sponsored its quest to conquer neighbouring kingdoms and acquire more land for itself. During these ambitious expeditions, Ndongo became one of many kingdoms appropriated to the rulership of Kongo. Consequently, Ndongo became a vassal state to Kongo, at least, until the early 1500s when it successfully broke free.
During the same period, colonial power was gradually brewing in the region, under the guise of commerce and exploration. In 1482, Diogo Cão of Portugal had discovered Kongo, and having met a kingdom already thriving in trade and commerce, established diplomatic ties with it on behalf of Portugal. As a result, Kongo grew even more rapidly, becoming one of the most powerful nations in West Central Africa during the era.
In the same year Portugal was discovering Kongo, it was also building a fort in Elmina, a town located on the coastline of today’s Ghana. At Elmina, the Portuguese had discovered gold and were exploring export and import trade relationships to take advantage of the gold. This trade relationship would eventually grow so large that it would demand more labour to keep it going — a demand that would eventually create the slave trade that ravished the region.
In Kongo, the story was quite different. The Portuguese had already discovered the enormous economic potential of sugar cultivation and had begun appropriating uninhabited islands along the West-Central Africa coastlines to build sugar plantations, including São Tomé, an island in the Gulf of Guinea. On São Tomé, they built one of the earliest large-scale plantation economies in the Atlantic. These plantations expanded rapidly, creating an enormous demand for enslaved labour.
At this point, it is important to emphasise that enslaved labour had become an in-demand commodity in both Elmina and São Tomé and it needed to be satiated. This created an increased drive for slaves, a drive that would eventually go beyond what was required for gold and sugar trade and evolve into the exportation of slaves to the West — the transAtlantic slave trade.
Several parts of Africa would eventually supply this new found commerce. Kongo and Ndongo, crucial connectors to the mainlands of Africa would, in particular, become one of many supply centres. At first, the economic and political benefits were too great for the people of both kingdoms to realise the harm they were engendering, especially for a trade that was not new to them. Slaves had always been a part of their lives, obtained from conquests, direct sales, as a payment method etc.
However, the slave trade soon became so huge and figuratively, so thirsty, that both kingdoms could no longer satiate it. As a matter of fact, indigenes of both lands were rapidly becoming commodities themselves. Slave raiders had become a thing and there was no peace in the land. People could barely move freely without the fear of being captured. In one of numerous letters sent by King Afonso, one of the rulers of Kongo during the era, he states that even nobles and royal family members had become victims to the trade. Indigenes, who had also become greedy to take advantage of the trade, were also selling kinsmen and other indigenes off, discreetly. A similar situation existed in Ndongo.
In what can be described as a commendable attempt, both Kongo and Ndongo repeatedly tried to stop the slave trade, diplomatically and by force, respectively. All efforts proved futile. The immense benefits the trade created for the Portuguese was too much for them to put a stop to their activities.
This was the era Nzinga was born into — a tumultuous time for her people. Ordinarily, in Ndongo, rulership was elective. An Ngola would be chosen after an election process that entailed considering the various eligible members of the royal family. Being chosen highly depended on the alliances and personal relationships each candidate was able to forge. Once chosen, the new Ngola was expected to redistribute wealth to reward his/her followers. As mentioned earlier, Ndongo’s political system resisted female rulers, yet Nzinga managed to rise to power through a strategic move that resulted in the death of a rival heir, the son of her brother, the previous Ngola.
When her brother died and Nzinga seized power, first as regent, then as queen, the Portuguese, who had developed diplomatic ties with Ndongo, refused to accept her and backed a male rival. The Portuguese knew that Nzinga was a threat to them. As a matter of fact, she had served as an emissary between Ndongo and the Portuguese for years during her brother’s reign. They had encountered her and understood that she was not of a subservient nature like the numerous rulers they had turned into puppets, both in Ndongo and in other kingdoms.
A particularly sour experience the Portuguese must have not been in a hurry to forget was when Nzinga was sent to Luanda, the Portuguese stronghold on the coast of Ndongo, to negotiate with the colonial governor as her brother’s emissary. As the tale was later recorded — decades afterward, by the Italian missionary Cavazzi, and very likely burnished in the retelling — the governor left Nzinga without a chair, offering only a floor mat, so that she would have to sit beneath him. She is said to have summoned one of her attendants, had the woman kneel, and sat upon her back, meeting the governor at eye level. Whether or not the scene happened exactly so, it captured something phenomenal about her character: Njinga did not accept a subordinate’s position, then or ever. Although she accepted baptism on the same journey, adopting the name, Ana de Sousa, and taking the Portuguese governor’s own surname, it was not out of surrender but as a diplomatic instrument, a card she played. Ultimately, she managed to negotiate a peace treaty but as soon as she left Luanda, the Portuguese broke it
So when she ascended to the throne, it is quite understandable that the Portuguese refused to back up someone who had previously shown such defiance. After becoming queen, Nzinga negotiated another treaty with the Portuguese in 1624. This allowed the latter to trade, even in slaves, and carry out missionary work in return for keeping the territorial integrity of Ndongo intact and demolishing a fort the Portuguese had built in Ndongo. However, yet again, both parties would not fulfil the end of their bargain. Nzinga breached part of the treaty’s terms and sheltered runaway slaves while the Portuguese refused to remove the fort they had established.
Rather than accept her authority, the Portuguese began supporting rival claimants to the Ndongo throne and using them to challenge her rule. A war that lasted nearly forty years thus began. While the slave trade had already created substantial friction between both parties, the ascent of an unapproved ruler evolved this friction into full-blown hostility. By the early 1600s, the Portuguese began employing Imbangala war bands—militarised groups that had emerged in the interior—to raid and destabilise Ndongo. Consequently, Ndongo experienced several great losses that almost led to the extinction of the Ndongo kingdom.
Nzinga, in an attempt to rebuild her military strength turned to the Imbangala, the same group whose activities had caused so much destruction in Ndongo. Through a symbolic marriage and political strategy, Nzinga took control of an Imbangala band known as the Kanza, located just south of the Kwanza River. She subsequently has her followers trained in Imbangala military practices. This new military strength enabled her retreat to the south of Kwanza where Portuguese forces were less willing to pursue her. There, she set up a settlement that eventually became a permanent retreat location whenever she was under attack.
Over the years, Nzinga would personally lead several campaigns against the Portuguese and the puppet kings they had installed in Ndongo. In 1629, she lost control of the Kanza band and was forced to retreat to the east, to the neighbouring Kingdom of Matamba. Matamba had itself been weakened by attacks from Kasanje, another Imbangala polity that had grown into a powerful kingdom east of Ndongo. Nzinga seized the opportunity. In 1631, she took control of Matamba and made it the new centre of her power. From there, she continued to lay claim to Ndongo while building Matamba into a formidable kingdom in its own right.
For the next decade, Nzinga continued her resistance against the Portuguese, and her position gradually became stronger. By the 1640s, she had become powerful enough to pose a serious challenge to Portuguese ambitions in the region. She expanded the borders of Matamba which gave her access to territory, trade routes and military resources that allowed her to withstand Portuguese pressure. By the 1640s, she had become powerful enough to pose a serious challenge to Portuguese ambitions in the region. , defeated Ngola Hari a Kiluanje whom the Portuguese had installed over Ndongo,and also and cut off the Portuguese slaving raids.
Garcia II, the King in the North
While Nzinga was strengthening her position inland, Kongo produced a defiant king of its own. Garcia II, Nkanga a Lukeni a Nzenze a Ntumba, who ruled Kongo as Garcia Afonso from 1641 , was like Afonso before him, a product of the kingdom’s Christian institutions. He was educated by the Jesuits at the capital, São Salvador (Mbanza Kongo), and rose to power the way ambitious men often did in an elective monarchy: through war and manoeuvre.
By this time, the relationship between Kongo and Portugal had already deteriorated considerably. In 1622, Portuguese forces had invaded Kongo, only for the Kongolese army under King Pedro II to defeat them. Pedro II responded by seeking diplomatic and military support beyond Portugal and even proposed an alliance with the Dutch West India Company to attack Luanda from both land and sea. The plan was simple; Kongo would attack from the mainland while the Dutch would attack Luanda by sea.
Unfortunately, before this plan could hatch, Pedro II died. By now, it was 1624 and for reasons best understood by him, his successor, Garcia I, chose to reconcile with Portugal abandoning the immediate offensive. In a wise move, he however did not completely abandon Kongo’s subsisting relationship with the Dutch.
During this period, internal strife was rife within Kongo itself. Royal successions were becoming more violent as different branches of the ruling family fought for control. One of the most powerful figures in the kingdom at the time was Daniel da Silva, Duke of Mbamba, who also controlled the wealthy and strategically important province of Soyo. Daniel would eventually turn against Álvaro IV and threaten his position.
During this crisis, two brothers, Garcia and Alvaro, who would later become kings of Kongo, came to the king’s aid. Their defeat of Daniel da Silva was the beginning of their being distinguished in Kongo’s political spaces. As a result of their efforts, Garcia was made the Marquis of Kiova while his brother, Álvaro was made Duke of Mbamba. These political rewards placed both brothers among the most powerful men in Kongo and they themselves soon became a threat to the King’s position. Perceiving the danger they pesented, King Álvaro V turned against the brothers and attempted to have them killed. They fought back, defeated the king and beheaded him. Álvaro, Garcia's brother, then became King Álvaro VI, while Garcia was made Duke of Mbamba.
Garcia was not a newcomer to power when he eventually became king. He had already fought for the throne, commanded armies and built a reputation as one of the kingdom's most powerful nobles. When Álvaro VI died in January 1641, Garcia moved quickly. Before another election could be held, he moved his forces from Mbamba to the capital and took the throne for himself, becoming King Garcia II.
And that was how King Garcia, who happens to be the subject of our narration today, became King of Kongo. However, Garcia could hardly have chosen a more difficult time to become king. Almost immediately, Soyo became a problem. The county had long enjoyed a degree of independence from the central authority of Kongo, and its ruler, Count Daniel da Silva, was no friend of Garcia. When the previous Count of Soyo, Paulo, died in 1641, Daniel took his place and resisted Garcia's attempt to bring Soyo firmly back under royal control. The dispute would eventually become a civil war within Kongo, forcing Garcia to divide his attention between his struggle against Portugal and the political crisis developing within his own kingdom.
The Coalition of Nzinga, Garcia II and the Dutch Force
In August 1641, immediately after Garcia took the throne, a remarkable opportunity to get rid of his adversaries presented itself. In the same year, the Dutch West India Company had attacked Luanda and it took only a few days before the Portuguese commander withdrew towards the Bengo River. The Dutch moved into Luanda and soon extended their occupation to Benguela and other Portuguese holdings.
With Luanda now in Dutch hands, Garcia had the opportunity to turn Pedro II’s old proposal into reality. He therefore moved quickly to establish relations with the Dutch. On the 28th of March 1642, this venture yielded positively and Kongo formally entered into an alliance with the Dutch West Indica Company.
They both had a common enemy — Portugal — albeit for different reasons. For the Dutch, they simply wanted to destroy Portuguese power in Angola and take advantage of its trade. For Garcia, he needed to weaken Portuguese presence on Kongo’s southern frontier and remove a power that had repeatedly interfered in the affairs of his kingdom. The alliance provided that Dutch troops would provide military assistance, while Kongo supplied resources, including enslaved captives, that helped the Dutch maintain their operations.
As all these were happening, somehow the turn of events was also changing Nzinga’s position. Recognising that the Portuguese had lost Luanda, the coastal stronghold from which they had warred against Ndongo for decades, she entered into her own alliance with the Dutch, the perpetrator of Portugal’s loss. The Dutch supplied Nzinga with firearms, giving her an advantage she had not previously possessed in her long war against Portugal. Using the opportunity, Nzinga sent her lieutenant, Njinga Amona, with an army into the Dembos, a region lying between Kongo and the territories under her control. Most of the local chiefs submitted, while one who resisted was defeated.
Dembos was quite a strategic location and its importance can not be overlooked. Taking control of this region gave Nzinga a way to move towards the coast without directly passing through the strongest Portuguese locations. From Kavanga, where she established herself with her forces, she was able to strengthen her hold over the Dembos and threaten the Portuguese stronghold of Ambaca. At the same time, Kongo was moving against the Portuguese from the north. The Portuguese were therefore beginning to face attacks from several directions rather than simply fighting Nzinga in the interior.
Garcia also posed a substantial threat to the Portuguese. On 24 September 1642, with Dutch assistance, his forces defeated the Portuguese in battle after marching south into Angola. Kongo's army was now operating alongside the Dutch against Portugal, while Nzinga's forces were establishing themselves further south. For the first time, the Portuguese faced a combination of African kingdoms and a European military power that threatened both their inland positions and their access to the coast. It was the closest anyone would come, for three centuries, to expelling a European power from the region altogether.
However, the individual interests of each party soon became a problem. The Dutch, for instance, wanted to profit from their control of Luanda and were not always willing to pursue the Portuguese deep into the interior. This meant that Portuguese forces could withdraw inland, as far as Massangano and other fortified positions, and maintain connections with African rulers in the hinterland while also using the Bengo and Kwanza rivers to maintain contact with the coast and obtain supplies. The Dutch also depended on Kongo and Nzinga for enslaved people, yet both African powers struggled to supply them in the quantities they demanded.
In 1643, the situation became even more complicated. Portuguese conditions in Massangano had become difficult, with food and other supplies running short. The Dutch could have had a quick and sweeping victory during this period, instead, they agreed to a truce with the Portuguese on the 30th of January.
This made Garcia furious. He had entered the alliance to drive the Portuguese out, and a Dutch truce undermined that objective. At the same time, his own kingdom was facing the growing threat from Soyo and the possibility of civil war. Garcia therefore withdrew from the alliance temporarily so that he could deal with the crisis at home.
However, the truce between Portuguese and the Dutch did not last. By May, the Dutch attacked the Portuguese again after suspecting that they were preparing an attack on Luanda. By this time, food supplies were running low in both Luanda and Massangano, leading to the creation of another truce in July.
Nzinga, on the other hand, continued to fight from the locations she had harnessed. In early 1644, she intensified her attacks on Portuguese strongholds. By this time, the Dutch were becoming more reliant on her for supplies and had realised the importance of establishing themselves inland. Their attempts were however repeatedly frustrated by Portuguese control of the surrounding waterways, while food shortages gradually became severe in Luanda. By the end of 1644, the Dutch garrison was struggling simply to feed itself.
In October 1645, Francisco de Souto-Maior arrived in Angola with 260 Portuguese soldiers as reinforcements. He avoided Dutch surveillance by landing south of Luanda and marching towards Massangano, where his arrival strengthened the Portuguese position considerably. The Portuguese then turned their attention to Nzinga. In March 1646, with the assistance of Filipe of Ndongo and a large African auxiliary force that included Ambundu archers, Imbangala fighters and buffalo hunters, they defeated Nzinga at the Battle of Kavanga. Nzinga escaped, but her sister Bárbara was captured by the Portuguese. Even this defeat did not convince her to negotiate peace.
The Portuguese victory, however, did not end the war. Souto-Maior died in May 1646 while preparing to attack the Dutch, and the Portuguese forces were left under a council of commanders. With no strong command, their position became weaker. Imagine a scenario where Portuguese forces were isolated in the interior while Dutch-controlled Luanda and Nzinga forces continued to attack them. Even their access to the coast had become cut off by now. Attempts to open a route were aggressively repulsed by the Dutch near the Lucala River. By 1647, the Portuguese were holding on largely through their fortified positions and the support of African allies.
The Battle of Kombi
On the 25th of November 1647, the forces of Nzinga and the Dutch defeated the Portuguese at the Battle of Kombi. The victory was followed by another Dutch-Matamba victory in August 1648. Nzinga then moved to encircle the three major Portuguese strongholds of Ambaca, Massangano and Muxima. During this siege, hope for the Portuguese increasingly looked bleak. They had been pushed so far away from the coast that their forces were suffering from isolation and shortages, and the combined forces of Nzinga and the Dutch were now closing in on their remaining strongholds, which somehow, the allies never possessed enough artillery to overcome.
Then, on August 24, 1648, a Portuguese fleet of eleven ships, carrying about 1,100 men, brought salvation to the isolated Portuguese soldiers. Under the command of Salvador de Sá, Portugal reclaimed Luanda. The Dutch position collapsed with surprising speed. Many Dutch troops had been away, fighting alongside Nzinga when the Portuguese attacked, and by the time they returned, Luanda had fallen.
Recognising defeat, the Dutch withdrew and the coalition subsequently dissolved.
In Kongo, Garcia was forced back toward accommodation and made to pay an indemnity. In 1649, he proposed a treaty that went unsigned. Njinga, for her part, was forced to lift her sieges of Ambaca, Muxima and Massangano and retreat to Matamba. The Portuguese immediately began rebuilding their alliances in the region, bringing chiefs who had supported the Dutch back under Portuguese influence and making peace with Kasanje. For Nzinga, the loss was devastating, but it was not the end of her resistance. She simply retreated inland where she fought on — well into her seventies.
A treaty in 1656 would eventually recognise her as ruler of Matamba and parts of Ndongo. She died in 1663, around eighty years old, still sovereign.
Garcia, on the other hand, died in 1660, and the ending came fast. His successor, António I, carried on the same defiant front and marched against the Portuguese at the Battle of Mbwila (also called Ambuila) on the 29th of October 1665. There, the Portuguese destroyed the Kongo army and killed the king on the field. Mbwila shattered the central authority of the kingdom. The rival royal houses, Kinlaza and Kimpanzu, turned on each other, and Kongo dissolved into a century of civil war from which it never fully recovered — a chaos out of which the prophet Kimpa Vita would later rise, trying to rebuild a Christian Kongo on her own terms.
And here the honesty the story demands must be told. Njinga’s legacy is genuinely contested: her wars produced captives in enormous numbers, and she sold them into the same Atlantic trade she is remembered for resisting. Portuguese and missionary sources emphasised her Catholic baptism and her slaving; Angolan nationalists later made her the mother-symbol of anti-colonial resistance. In history, she was both. Garcia, too, traded in slaves; the wealth and warfare of Christian Kongo were bound up in it. To honour these rulers fully is to hold the whole of them.
—------------------
The Atlantic century had come full circle. It opened in 1482 with a single caravel at the mouth of the river, welcomed by a confident and sovereign kingdom. It closed, in the space of Garcia II’s lifetime and its immediate aftermath, with that same kingdom broken into warring fragments — its people, by then, a principal export commodity.
Across nearly two centuries, Kongo and Ndongo were never passive. They chose — conversion, protest, alliance, resistance — and they chose shrewdly. What defeated them was not the superiority of the common enemy they faced; it was a single, patient, corrosive force: a market whose demand for human beings was bottomless, and which rewarded whoever would turn a neighbour into cargo. That they lost does not make them victims. It makes them the first to face what was coming — and to leave us, in Afonso’s letters and Njinga’s wars and Garcia’s alliance, a record of what it looked like to resist.
And what fate befell the Portuguese who imposed themselves on a region they were not native to? The defeat of Ndongo and Matamba changed the political landscape of Central Africa. Portugal built a new fort at Pungu a Ndongo and established direct rule over the Mbundu. Ndongo, which had previously been a source of slaves, became a corridor into the interior of Africa. New kingdoms emerged further east, including Kasanje and Lunda, and by the eighteenth century, more than 10,000 slaves were being moved through Ndongo territory every year.
While the Portuguese emerged victorious over the Dutch and their African allies, it was the economic stability of Brazil — and its preservation — that would ultimately shape the fate of the Ndongo region. Angola became so closely tied to Brazil that some historians have described it as a de facto Brazilian colony. Soon, other European powers joined the West African slave trade, establishing new routes into the interior.
