by Emily Hahn
The two sisters were kept in Loanda, where they were of course converted, and baptized under the names of Dona Barbara and Dona Engraçia. Later they escaped.
For the following eight years Queen Nzinga carried on a harrying war against the Portuguese. She would have gone all out in a direct campaign, but a rival Jaga, Kasanji, had taken advantage of her temporary retirement to build up dangerous strength, and he distracted her attention and kept her forces employed against his own, rather than the Portuguese. As a side line which met with more success, she attacked and vanquished a neighboring country, Matamba, which like her own was ruled by a woman, though Muongo Matamba, the other queen, was not of such stern stuff as was her conqueror. When Nzinga branded her royal captive as a slave, Muongo Matamba died of grief. Her country became for a time after that a battlefield between the two fierce Jaga leaders, Nzinga and Kasanji.
In 1636 the Portuguese governor managed to get in touch with Nzinga through two missionaries, and a rather precarious peace was declared. It was not to last.
Quite naturally, the amazing woman had by this time become a household word of terror throughout Central Africa. Her eccentricities became more pronounced through the years, and a most interesting account of her has been left by the Dutchman Dapper, who, like Purchas, collected and published a number of travelers’ tales, including this from a Captain Fuller.
“She is a cunning and prudent virago, so much addicted to arms, that she hardly uses other exercise; and withal so generously valiant, that she never hurt a Portuguese after quarter given, and commanded all her slaves and soldiers the like.
“She and her people (for the most part) lead an unsettled life, roving up and down from place to place, like the Jagas; Before any enterprise undertaken, though of meanest concern, they ask counsel of the Devil; to which end they have an idol, to whom they sacrifice a living person, of the wisest and comeliest they can pick out.”
The following description of this ceremony is not unlike that given by Andrew Battell, who told Purchas some years earlier that he had witnessed a human sacrifice made by a great Jaga chief Kalendula. However, Battell says that the Jaga had no idols, only fetishes, and his report is probably the more accurate. Queen Nzinga sacrificed not to an idol, but to one or all of her five favorite ancestral spirits, including Ngola Nzinga Mbandi. His bones, remember, were always there with her, in their silver casket.
“The Queen against the time of this sacrifice, clothes herself in man’s apparel (nor indeed does she at any time go otherwise habited) hanging about her the skins of beasts, before and behind, with a sword about her neck, an axe at her girdle, and a bow and arrow in her hand, leaping according to their custom, now here, then there, as nimbly as the most active among her attendants; all the while striking her engema, that is, two iron balls, which serve her instead of drums.
“When she thinks she has made a show long enough, in a masculine manner, and thereby hath wearied herself, then she takes a broad feather and sticks it through the holes of her boar’d nose for a sign of war.
“She herself in this rage, begins with the first of those appointed to be sacrificed; and cutting of his head, drinks a great draught of his blood. Then follow the stoutest commanders and do as she hath done; and this with a great hurly-burly, tumult, and playing upon instruments about their idol.”
A curious note follows close upon this, the more curious when one recalls that Nzinga at that time was at least fifty-five years old. “The Queen keeps fifty or sixty young men instead of husbands, each of which may have as many wives as they please, with this proviso, that if any of them be with child, themselves must kill the infant as soon as born.… The Queen used this very custom at that time, neither dare any of these selected young men own their sex, or mention hers; And for the more orderly concealing thereof, she clothes them in women’s apparel, according to her manner, and goeth herself in man’s habit, giving out that they are women, and she a man. All these have women’s names, but the Queen herself a man’s, especially in the army, and will acknowledge no otherwise; nay her favourites dare not say the contrary, upon peril of their heads; and as a testimony therein of their obedience and constancy to her, permits them to go freely among the women; and if they fail in their obligations, they seldom escape to tell further news.”
In 1641, a few years after Queen Nzinga made her uneasy truce with Portugal, the Dutch came onto the African scene. In a hasty scramble to beat the date of a Dutch-Portuguese armistice which was soon to be signed, they occupied as much Portuguese territory as they could. Nzinga gladly offered to help these newcomers against her hated enemy, and the combined Dutch and Jaga forces held the Portuguese out of the territory they had themselves settled until 1648. The Queen suffered a severe defeat two years before the end, however. In the worst battle her sisters were again captured by the Portuguese, and only one of them, Dona Barbara, survived this captivity. With the arrival of Salvador Correa de Sa Benavides in August 1648, Loanda was taken back by the Portuguese, Nzinga’s special three hundred Dutch allies surrendered with their compatriots, and the Queen retired once more to the backwoods.
At that point anyone but Nzinga would have called it a day. The redoubtable old warrior did indeed rest on her laurels for some years. But she reappears on the pages of history in the most bizarre role which even she had ever played. In 1655, at the age of seventy-three, Queen Nzinga got religion again.
Her conscience, she said, was troubling her. She had consulted the spirits of her five ancestors, as she so often did. This time—oh horror!—they told her dolefully that they were in hell, the Christian hell, of all places, suffering orthodox tortures. It was all Nzinga’s fault too. Only she could save them (and of course herself as well) by once more joining the Holy Church, and this meant peace with the Portuguese in the bargain.
The old Queen lost no time in making overtures to the proper authorities, and they were more than willing to co-operate. First they let her ransom her surviving sister Dona Barbara, with two hundred slaves. Then they settled with her, amicably, the boundaries of her domain, which had for so many years been the cause of battle. Even now Nzinga did not pay tribute.
Finally, when she was seventy-five years old, Queen Nzinga was again received into the Church, and baptized just as she had been before. It was in many ways what might be called an unusual ceremony, especially as immediately after the baptism, and in the same church, she was married. The bridegroom was one Don Salvatore, probably a former member of her harem bodyguard.
Quietly now, no longer troubled by her conscience, Queen Nzinga lived another eight years. She was eighty-three when she died. All the last rites were observed. She was buried in church. There can be no possible doubt, under these circumstances, that her five spiritual counselors are now at ease with their daughter Nzinga in a Christian heaven.
Bride by Proxy
Marie Françoise
The golden court of the Sun King, Louis XIV, is always a good spectacle. Louis and his people were openly grabby for wealth, self-indulgent, dedicated to a pursuit which they followed with that fervor often called religious. I do not consider their favorite game politics. That is an ugly word which falls far short of what we need. It is only a synonym for policy, and policy is a cold common-sense thing, whereas Louis’s pastime was complicated and passionate. Sometimes he sacrificed reason to pure dazzling technique.
Like many other historical personages, Louis never even thought of losing the world for love, his own love or anyone else’s. That does not mean that he lost love for the world, only that he never felt he need make a choice. Why not keep both?
To gain his ends, Louis used love like a master; nay, like a whoremaster. With great difficulty I am restraining myself from using two overworked similes for the pretty women he manipulated. I am resolved to call them neither puppets nor pawns. One does not mind the banality of a good simile, but I feel these are not good. Puppets need supervision for every gesture and act, whereas the girls of Louis’s Versailles, once
they were pushed out on the stage to play their roles, acted on their own. The King was a psychologist. Such and such a man or woman, given certain directions, could be expected to behave in this way or that. It was all a matter of foresight. Louis gave them the first shove and then trusted to remote control and early training.
Nor were they pawns. I don’t know much about chess, but I have always felt that the international game as Louis played it was not subtle enough to be compared to chess. Human intrigue seldom rises above the subtlety of checkers.
The story of Affonso VI of Portugal was one of the many which Louis XIV meddled in. It bears signs of his hand, but it was only a subplot, picked up and developed when the King needed it to strengthen his position and then dropped into obscurity until he happened to think of it again. Most of the time Portugal was out of the main stream. She was a long way off. Travelers neglected her, with the notable exception of England’s Charles II, and her own great men neglected the rest of Europe. As a result, she had a highly individual little court, formal in ways unexpected to other Europeans, and then suddenly informal in just as unexpected a manner. Her people were a mixture, in blood and in culture, of North and South, East and West—Iberian, Celt, Moor, and Oriental, with the Roman Catholic Church holding sway over all.
Marie Françoise, who was juggled and bounced in the fountain of Versailles intrigue like a pingpong ball before she married the King of Portugal, could have been one of Louis XIV’s more pitiable martyrs. A pretty, frivolous princess, thoroughly French in training, from a court that exemplified form, surface, and decoration, she might almost as well have been set down in Nzinga’s savage country as exiled to Portugal. The very amusements of the two sets of courtiers made a contrast which appalled her. At Versailles they had ballet and pageants and exquisite, slow-moving plays in which the King and his followers acted, glittering in silver and pale blue brocade. At Lisbon they murdered bulls. Her husband Affonso was himself like a bull, or, rather, a bull calf.
The Queen had two strong appetites. One, for love, she was born with. The other, for power, she began to take in with her first breath and imbibe with her first milk. Had she been in a position more important to Louis, or had her kingly husband been of greater value to Europe, her fate would have been fixed. She would have had to strangle the sexual appetite and remain Affonso’s Queen. As it was, however, she did not have to make a choice. Greedy as her royal master, and left alone among people she considered barbarians, the Frenchwoman accomplished a surprising thing: she ate her cake and had it too. She was a true child of Louis XIV’s Versailles.
“Love or power?” one can imagine her guardian angel demanding in stern accents.
“Both, please,” says Marie Françoise, reaching out and taking them.
The royal palace at Cintra stands on its mountaintop, a fairytale edifice with queer round chimneys, gleaming above the dark green woods and the looping road like one of those Italian castles in Renaissance paintings, from which a brilliant cavalcade winds down to the plain. When one stares up at the countless windows they seem small and faraway. When, inside, one looks out of those same windows, they are larger, but not large enough to afford a view of the full panorama. The walls are thick.
High up in the palace one August day we paused in the stony corridor, where even in the heat of Portuguese summer the air is always dank. An obedient sight-seer, I peered through a door which had a shabby red rope stretched across it, into an ancient bedchamber, not overspacious though there was a lofty ceiling. A faint mark lay across the floor; it looked like a very shallow trough in the stone.
“Here,” said my friendly guide, “lived and died poor Dom Affonso VI, a prisoner for many years. He was the rightful King, but his place was usurped. To get him out of the way, they said he was mad.” He frowned with an indignation which has survived in his country for more than two hundred and fifty years as he imagined the poor caged creature pacing back and forth over the stone floor. The Portuguese never let any of their history expire.
“He was not mad,” said the guide, his voice quivering.
But was he altogether sane? It must be admitted that the Braganzas were not in general a stable family. Had Affonso’s sister Catherine been more robust, the Stuarts of England would have prospered better. Affonso himself was the victim of worse than weakness. He was crippled at the age of three, when a fever of some sort, which one historian mysteriously calls a “palsie,” left him paralyzed on one side. Probably he was bled too often.
He may have been an epileptic. Anyway he was odd, there was no doubt of that. His court attendants were aware of it long before he succeeded to the throne at thirteen, when his father died.
If we had enough recorded details of Affonso’s peculiar antics in childhood, some psychiatrist would doubtless slap a label on whatever was wrong with him. (Apart, that is, from the state of royalty, often a disability in itself.) We must content ourselves with such data as we have, which doesn’t really prove that he was certifiable according to our lights. Most of the symptoms fall into the wide ditch which lies between sanity and lunacy.
He is alleged to have said at the age of ten, when his older brother Theodosius lay dying, “that he should not be much troubled for his Death, if it should happen, since he should thereby get a Crown.…” In a young boy that remark is not necessarily an example of depravity, but there is no doubt it was uncomfortably honest. Throughout his life Affonso was to be awkwardly forthright. The English envoy Sir Robert Southwell, when the King was grown up, wrote about him to Lord Arlington:
“… For as he knew nothing of dissimulation, but always spoke the truth so what evil he ever heard of any man he would in his anger upbraid him of it, without consideration of time, or place, or the person.…”
Considering Affonso’s high position, his childhood was not unduly formal. He was neither overdisciplined nor segregated. He played as much as he liked with his little brother Pedro, who bore the title “Infant” and was five years younger than himself. He saw very little of his sister Catherine, two years his senior, but that was normal in Portugal where women lived in almost oriental seclusion. The widowed queen regent Dona Luiza, a Spanish woman with tremendous force of character, ran the affairs of the country, which was kept drained by the long war with Spain, and watched over Affonso with a close attention which was strategic rather than affectionate. No regent ever took her responsibilities more to heart than did Dona Luiza. When Affonso’s childish naughtiness began to grow out of bounds, she was the first of the court to feel misgivings about his future and that of the country. She seemed actually eager to find an excuse to oust him from the throne. Most mothers are stubbornly blind to the faults of their sons, but as regards her first-born the queen regent was not. On the contrary, almost before Affonso proved himself a problem child, she was saying that he was one. Pedro was her darling. Pedro, she felt, was ordained by Nature to be the sovereign.
Affonso was difficult. He was not precociously vicious in sexual matters. He did not steal; he never lied, but from earliest youth he was mad on fighting. He looked everywhere for violence. His greatest pleasure was to mix in a good fight himself: failing that, he wanted to watch dogs attack each other, or bulls at bay, or men struggling. He loved mob scenes. Perhaps this taste for ferocity was aggravated by his medical history. He may have been proving to himself and the world that he was as good as any able-bodied man in the kingdom. As a little boy he often slipped the leash, ran away and stirred up brawls; he was the bane of his attendants’ lives. As he grew older, he became a danger to the people of the city and to himself as well. Citizens, failing to recognize in the brawling bully their ever-to-be-respected King, sometimes blacked his eyes. Once an irreverent bull tossed him and broke a few of the royal bones. But no mishap cooled him down or tamed him, and scandal accumulated around his name in Lisbon.
Another annoyance to the queen mother was the company her royal son kept. He had no sense of dignity, an unusual lack in a Portuguese. Soon after his father’
s death he picked up a most unsuitable playmate, an older boy, Italian-born Antonio Conti, who sold toys at a booth near the palace. (This palace stood where the lovely Black Horse Square was later erected by Pombal.) Affonso was fascinated by Conti, for he was strong and active, the leader of a boys’ mob distinguished in the King’s eyes for its fighting prowess. Dona Luiza and the royal preceptors tried earnestly to break off this unconventional association, but Affonso clung to his chum. Conti often smuggled his brother Giovanni and other street urchins into the palace grounds, where Affonso spent happy hours watching the juvenile gladiators, sometimes himself taking a turn in the ring with a Negro or mulatto opponent. The gang was made up of tough boys, a motley of the nationalities that swarm over any seaport town. They introduced dog fighting as a regular form of sport, inciting to battle the mastiffs that guarded the royal precincts.
Now and then some scandalized courtier tried to lure his King’s attention to a more genteel form of warfare such as fencing, but Affonso liked knife throwing better, because it was a tougher game. Whenever it came to a choice between gentlemanly brutality and the lowlife sort, the King preferred the latter.
Such behavior might have been shrugged off as a youthful phase, but Affonso gave no signs of outgrowing his rough tastes. He grew up, but his boyish love for Conti continued to flourish. Nightly he would tear about the country with wild companions, now and then attacking some inoffensive animal. At least once he went farther than that and rushed at two harmless, unarmed citizens who were riding home in the dark. He injured no one, but the affair naturally caused talk, and it was all very awkward for his mother. Even in the seventeenth century when people were not fastidious, Affonso seems to have been beyond the limit.