by Emily Hahn
When the new Portuguese governor arrived in Loanda he received a surprise.
No doubt he was prepared for a certain amount of unconventionality in West Africa, though not so much as he was to encounter. João Correa de Sousa, for that was his name, had been assigned from Lisbon to this post in a colony not quite fifty years established. The white men could scarcely be described as safely installed, but Loanda itself was a large, well-built city, though unhealthy, and Portuguese influence had spread far into the fastnesses of the mainland.
Some native chiefs had by now come over to the Portuguese and willingly embraced their faith, giving in return the important amenities of a free hand in slave capturing. Others had not. The most powerful of those who resisted was Ngola Nzinga Mbandi, great King of Ndongo, whose territory the white men called Angola, after his title or rank “Ngola.” (“Angola” was to remain the name of a district the boundaries of which have radically shifted.)
João Correa de Sousa was aware that he was stepping straight into a war of long standing with this King; it was one of the affairs he most desired to settle.
It would, of course, be far better for the Portuguese not to be forced to waste their men and ammunition in such futile struggles. The governor was willing to be reasonable with the King of Ndongo—even to placate him to some extent—both because he hoped to be able to spread the holy word of God a little farther into the dark continent, and because peace would give an added impetus to slave export. A large part of Portugal’s wealth depended on Loanda. Sincerely in the name of God, the Portuguese traded profitably with the Negroes, exchanging for slaves commodities which natives highly prized—cowries from the fisheries on the island opposite Loanda, cloth from Europe or native palm cloth, brandy, salt, and horse tails. Cowries were used for native currency; cloth was used for their scanty garments; brandy intoxicated more thoroughly than palm wine and was much in demand. Salt in large crystals was rare in Africa; it is still as good as money or better in certain isolated districts of that continent. Horse tails, like elephant tails, yielded hair which the Negroes fashioned into magic rings or bangles, as they do today.
To obtain these luxuries, chiefs would go out on expeditions and collect prisoners, which they handed over to the whites. The Portuguese hastily “converted” their miserable captives, loaded them in crowded ships, and sent them off, chiefly to Brazil, though some were shipped to other South American ports and to Lisbon. The cruelty of these voyages was unbelievable, but it was a lucrative trade which satisfied almost everyone but the victims concerned. The black slave dealers had no qualms; slave trading was an old African institution, though admittedly before the arrival of the Portuguese it had never been practiced on such a grand scale. Some of the Portuguese themselves, however, felt compunctions, and a few of them, usually missionaries, now and then wrote protests against the methods and even against the entire institution of slavery. When criticism became too loud, the traders grudgingly instituted a reform of sorts; they sometimes sent priests along on the slave ships in order to administer last rites to the dying. The trade continued to flourish; it was important to Portugal that it should flourish. João Correa de Sousa, as governor, had his orders: the trade should not suffer longer from the interference of Ngola Nzinga Mbandi or any other native ruler.
So it was a relief to learn upon his arrival that this troublesome King had actually made overtures for an end to hostilities, and was rumored to be sending an ambassador to discuss a peace treaty. Ngola Nzinga Mbandi was a force with which it would be wise to compromise. He headed a formidable army of the dreaded Jaga people, and though not a Jaga himself, he had from all accounts adopted many of their most terrible habits. Of the cannibal Jaga we shall have more to say in due course.
Ngola Nzinga Mbandi was a usurper. True, his father had been King of Ndongo before him, but the rightful heir was another son whose mother had been Queen, whereas this King’s mother was only a slave. When the old King died—by common consent of his people, who assassinated him when his tyranny became too severe—Ngola Nzinga Mbandi went earnestly to work and won the throne for himself. He was not elected; he was a self-made King. He slaughtered his way to the throne, executing his opponents and competitors, in his zeal killing not only his half brother but his nephew as well, the son of Nzinga, one of his three sisters. As soon as his position was secure he began harrying the Portuguese, just as his father had done.
He had not had it all his own way, as a matter of fact; he had been forced by the Portuguese and their allies to flee into the interior. The white men’s troops still sporadically attacked and plundered his villages, carrying off the inhabitants and selling them at the coast. His strongest adherent and dependent, the King of lower Ndongo, had been so badly whipped that he paid tribute to the invaders; a hundred slaves every year. Knowing all this, the new governor had every reason to feel hopeful of good results from the projected interview with Ngola Nzinga Mbandi’s envoy. He was also curious, for the envoy was a woman, the Princess Nzinga, sister to the King, and to a seventeenth-century Portuguese such a situation was astonishing. Portuguese women were not at all independent.
The lady arrived and was received with all due honor by the city garrison drawn up under arms. She was lodged at the house of a prominent citizen and a few days later had her first interview with Correa de Sousa.
This meeting was not, incidentally, a romantic encounter, whatever the hopeful reader may for a moment expect. In 1621 Nzinga was forty years old. From the European point of view she could never have been a beauty, even in early youth. She had taken a good deal of trouble with her appearance, but she had not been motivated by any ordinary feminine spirit of vanity in so doing. She was dressed simply, but as befitted a person of royal blood. Correa de Sousa, as a newcomer, was no doubt unfamiliar with the finer points of the national costume of Angola; he was probably unaware that Nzinga was dressed as a man. But she was. A bark-cloth skirt or apron covered her privates in the masculine fashion rather than the feminine, which in itself was significant of Nzinga’s personality. A royal leopard skin hung down from her waist, which was bound with a belt of buffalo tail. Above the waist Nzinga naturally wore nothing—no Negro did—but a sort of skimpy mantle of palm cloth covered one arm. Her hair was uncovered, though several ornaments were stuck into it. Her nose was bored straight across from one nostril to the other, and, in honor of the occasion, she had probably placed decorative plugs in the holes.
It is tempting to pause here and imagine to the full the stupefaction which must have possessed those Portuguese gentlemen. The governor was new to the colony, but the others had no doubt lived long enough in Loanda to have picked up many of the extremely elegant habits which were remarked and derided by world travelers. A plethora of servants, a vast amount of easy, cheap authority, the excuse of Loanda’s insalubrious climate had made the colonists languid and lazy and delicate; each of them was followed by a concourse of attendants who carried handkerchief, mantle, even comb. Nzinga, in her unclothed hauteur and with her latent ferocity, seemed a more vital, virile figure than any of them.
The minute she arrived, followed by a retinue of male and female slaves who stood at the door, the unexpected occurred. In their preparations the Portuguese had innocently slighted their diplomatic guest. The governor sat in a chair, but no chair had been provided for the princess; instead, two gold-embroidered cushions lay on the floor, for her use and that of the interpreter. In Portugal ladies did not sit on chairs; they always crouched on cushions. But Nzinga was no Portuguese lady; indeed, as Correa de Sousa was soon to discover, she did not like to think of herself as a lady at all. She glanced at the cushions; she glanced at the governor’s chair. Then, without saying a word, she turned and looked at one of her female slaves. The woman promptly advanced to the center of the room and got down on her elbows and knees. With unperturbed dignity Nzinga seated herself on the level back thus presented, and signified that she was ready to begin with business. Swallowing their various emotions, the
Portuguese officials tried to concentrate on the matter in hand.
Their wonder grew. The woman Nzinga proved herself intelligent, shrewd, and unexpectedly diplomatic. To tell the truth, she was not the first African female to occupy an important position in public affairs. Royal blood in her country was a powerful thing, and there had been famous queens in the Congo and Ndongo, in her own family as in others. None of the rest of these women, however, went so far as did Nzinga in demanding and holding a man’s place in warlike or hunting activities, nor did the others ever achieve a reputation like hers. Her greatest fame was still to come, but during her stay in Loanda she made her personality felt.
During the preliminary skirmish which this conversation proved to be, the governor asked how much tribute the King of Ndongo was prepared to pay. The King’s sister professed herself taken aback by such an inquiry; he was not prepared to pay anything, she said. Tribute is paid only by a conquered nation to the nation which has conquered it. Her brother Ngola Nzinga Mbandi was not a vanquished king suing the victorious Portuguese for peace. The situation was quite otherwise: she represented a power which was willing to treat with another, equal, power on the subject of amicable relations.
Nzinga had a strong case. One of the things which her brother considered a grievance was that his dominion was often invaded by unofficial raiders from the Portuguese colony, parties made up of mulattoes, Europeanized Negroes (who were called Negros calçados—shoe-wearing blacks), and their leaders, who were ordinary white slave traders without portfolio, so to speak. These people had stirred up so many battles with their lawless expeditions that the governor in office before Correa de Sousa admitted their undesirability, and passed a law decreeing that only pumbieros descalços, which is to say shoeless hawkers, were henceforth permitted to penetrate the interior in search of slaves. But formulating a law was one thing, and enforcing it quite another.
Obviously, many questions would have to be discussed before the treaty was arranged, and Nzinga’s stay in Loanda would be a fairly protracted one. The first interview came at last to a close. The ambassadress rose to take her leave. She had already started for the exit door when the governor noticed that the miserable slave on whom she had been sitting remained crouching on the floor, quite motionless. He called out:
“You’ve forgotten your woman!”
Nzinga turned her head slightly and said over her shoulder, “Oh, my chair? But of course I don’t carry furniture about with me! You may keep it.”
She was gone. The woman still crouched in the middle of the room at their feet. The elegant white gentlemen were left staring at one another.
Probably one influence which formed Nzinga’s character, and not the least, was that of the Jaga with whom her brother waged his wars. She spent most of her time with them.
It is not easy to decide what one should call the Jaga, for they were not in the ordinary sense of the word a tribe or race. They drew their numbers from all or any sources. The only thing they passed along from one generation to another was their ferocity and their peculiar brand of philosophy. It is not even known where they originated; theirs was a name to terrify the other Africans, and inevitably many apocryphal stories were told of them. Some anthropologists say that they originated in East Africa, others say they came from Sierra Leone; when the Portuguese first encountered them (to the cost of the whites) they were ensconced in Central Africa and roamed wherever they wished, killing and robbing as they went.
The Jaga were true cannibals. Other Africans were part-time cannibals who ate human flesh for ceremonial purposes or as a change from their everyday diet, or in the excitement of victory after battle, but the Jaga were cannibals as a matter of habit, convenience, and conviction. They kept no flocks nor indulged in any other agricultural pursuits. They were purely nomadic robbers. A man named Andrew Battell, who got back to England about ten years before Nzinga paid her visit to Loanda, lived eighteen months with these people after he fled to the interior from the Portuguese, who were keeping him captive.
“They rise in harvest,” he told Purchas, who afterward hastened home and made a record of his reports, “and invading some country, there stay as long as they find the palms, or other means of maintenance, and then seek new adventure. For they neither plant nor sow, nor breed up cattle, and, which is more strange, they nourish up none of their own children, although they have ten or twenty wives a man, of the properest and comeliest slaves they can take. But when they are in travail they dig a hole in the earth, which presently receiveth in that dark prison of death the newborn creature, not yet made happy with the light of life. Their reason is that they will not be troubled with education, nor in their flitting wanderings be troubled with such cumbersome burthens.… For of the conquered nations they preserve the boys from ten to twenty years of age, and bring them up as the hope of their succession … with education fitting their designs. These wear a collar about their neck in token of slavery, until they bring an enemy’s head slain in battle, and then they are uncollared, free’d, and dignified with the title of soldiers; if one of them runs away he is killed and eaten; so that, hemmed in betwixt hope and fear, they grow very resolute and adventurous, their collars breeding shame, disdain, and desperate fury, till they redeem their freedom as you have heard.”
These were the people who were Nzinga’s playmates in her youth, companions in her maturity, and bedmates presumably all the time. Later she maintained a kind of male Jaga harem, or bodyguard of masculine concubines, rather in the reputed fashion of Catherine the Great. Knowing all this after the event, one may be inclined to wonder a little at something she did before she left Loanda, where she lived the better part of a year, concluding a good workmanlike treaty which did not include a tribute clause. Nzinga joined the Holy Roman Catholic Church. Yes, she did. In the process she was baptized Dona Anna de Sousa, João Correa de Sousa acting as her godfather.
The ambassadress enjoyed the whole affair. She thought the Church such a good idea that she returned to her brother the King full of ideas to convert him as well. She met with success up to a point, for he was infected enough by her enthusiasm to ask the authorities at Loanda to send him a priest. His request was promptly granted, no doubt too promptly, because those responsible did not take into account the imperious pride which was characteristic of Nzinga’s family. Instead of sending on the mission what the King expected as his right—a Portuguese priest—they nominated a subject of Ngola Nzinga Mbandi himself, a native who had been ordained there at Loanda. Not unnaturally, the King took umbrage at this action, which he considered a deliberate snub. He scrapped the treaty his sister Nzinga had so laboriously made with the governor. He went back to war. But bad luck pursued him. He was beaten off, his army deserted, and he fled to Ndangi, the island where his ancestors were buried.
There he too was buried with his fathers. Some historians say that he was murdered by a vassal of the Portuguese, but others think Nzinga poisoned him, in revenge for his murder of her son. If she did kill her brother, and for that reason, she certainly concealed her resentment for a long time. It is more likely—in fact, it is exceedingly likely—that she coveted the throne for herself. Moreover, she carried her brother’s bones around with her for the rest of her life; they always accompanied her to battle or religious ceremony thereafter in a silver casket she had procured from the Portuguese. But this practice of carting one’s family remains about with one was a custom common to her tribe and need not be taken as a sign of affection. Nzinga’s emotions do not seem to have been consistent, in our sense of the word, so perhaps she had harbored a grudge against her brother even when she was representing him as a loyal ambassadress; if she did poison him it might have been because of her dead son. One cannot without effort think of Nzinga as a loving, mourning mother, but anything is possible.
At any rate, we know that she followed her brother’s example when at last she mounted to the throne in 1623. She killed his son.
The new Queen also announced that she wa
s no longer a Christian, and though one might be excused for remarking that she had never behaved very much like one, even at the supposed heights of her pious phase, she seemed to be doing her earnest best to live up to this, her latest resolve. The beginning of her reign, like that of her brother’s, was marked by a number of political murders apart from that of the heir presumptive. She cemented her cordial relations with the Jaga who had followed the late King until they saw that his power was on the decline.
Then she got down to serious business and declared war on Portugal.
The Portuguese immediately counterattacked, diplomatically, by commanding the King of Ndongo (as they called him—he was that same vice-king of lower Ndongo who had long paid tribute to them) to fight his dangerous neighbor on their behalf. Yet if Nzinga had been willing to make a deal with the Portuguese by calling off the war in return for the vice-king’s territory, which she claimed as hers by right, they would not have hesitated to betray him. Nzinga would not agree, however; she much preferred, always, to fight.
A strong force of Portuguese promptly set out to subdue the impertinent female. They made their way to Ndangi Island where Nzinga was encamped with her forces among the tombs of dead kings. The Queen, following the Jaga fashion, asked the spirit of Ngola Nzinga Mbandi for advice, and he seems to have told her not to give battle. She therefore fled before the pursuing Portuguese. They caught up with her army and beat them badly, taking her two sisters prisoner. Nzinga, however, escaped into further reaches of forest toward the east and stayed hidden with the remnants of her troops until the Portuguese went back to Loanda. Then she returned to her old camp on Ndangi Island to meditate fresh forays.