Njinga of Ndongo and Matamba

Njinga was baptised Ana de Sousa at Luanda in 1622, at the age of about forty, in the course of the embassy that made her reputation. The baptism was part of a diplomatic settlement and there is no reason to think it insincere or to think it was only that. Within a few years the settlement had collapsed, the Portuguese had installed a rival, and she was fighting a war she could not win by conventional means. She allied with the Imbangala, mobile war bands with their own severe initiation and ritual discipline, and took on obligations that the church regarded as apostasy and that her own subjects would have read as the assumption of a war leader's religious authority. For roughly three decades she governed and fought in that register, holding rituals in which she consulted the ancestors and, according to the missionary accounts, presided personally.

From the mid 1650s she negotiated a return: Capuchins came to Matamba, she was reconciled to the church, married in a Christian rite, and died in a Capuchin habit in 1663. Read as a spiritual biography this looks erratic. Read as the religious dimension of sovereignty in seventeenth century west central Africa, where legitimacy had to be granted by the powers your people recognised, it is coherent.

Nearly everything detailed known about Njinga comes from Italian Capuchins, above all Giovanni Antonio Cavazzi, who lived at her court in her last years, and Antonio da Gaeta, who received her back into the church. Both wrote at length, both drew, and Cavazzi's illustrated manuscript is one of the richest visual sources on seventeenth century Angola. Both were also missionaries reporting to an order and to Rome, writing a narrative whose proper shape was the reclamation of a soul, and the more lurid material about her Imbangala years sits exactly where that narrative needs it.

Portuguese military and administrative records supply a second, differently interested account, of an enemy commander. Nothing survives from her own side in her own words. The consequence is that a woman who ruled for four decades reaches modern readers as a set of scenes chosen by her adversaries and her confessors, and that the most repeated stories about her, including the well known one about the chair at Luanda, come from that material and cannot be checked. Recent scholarship has worked to read the Capuchin sources against their own purposes rather than either accepting or discarding them, which is the only method available.