Unquiet Women

by Adams, Max;

  †† A reformist Christian movement that prefigures the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century. It was led initially by John Wycliffe, who advocated a vernacular English translation of the Bible.

  ‡‡ Her invariable term for herself.

  §§ See page 7.

  ## See page 144.

  ∫∫ He of the Très Riches Heures (see page 157).

  ΩΩ Christine de Pizan enjoys a place setting at Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party table.

  ≈≈ At least, she composed a text, copied out fair by a complicit family servant, Thomas Kela.

  ∂∂ Magdalen Vanstone is the victim of illegitimacy in Wilkie Collins’s No Name (1862); Helen Huntingdon is the abused wife who becomes The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (Anne Brontë 1848); the Schlegels are the eventual occupants of E. M. Forster’s Howards End (1910). Jane Eyre and Elizabeth Bennet need no introduction. Caroline Norton (1808–77) was a writer and political activist who fought against her husband’s abuse and his exclusive custody of her children, and instigated three key laws on women’s rights: over infant custody (1839), divorce (1857), and married women’s property (1870).

  Chapter Seven

  New worlds

  ✥

  QUEEN NJINGA OF NDONGO ~ TWO NATIVE WOMEN: MALINTZIN AND ANACAONA ~ MATRIARCHS OF CHACO CANYON ~ ANNE BRADSTREET: HIGH AND MIGHTY ~ THE WILL OF ANA DE LA CALLE

  Even in the days of the Pastons, the Old World was expanding. The European colonial adventure that began in the fifteenth century brought traders and explorers, soldiers and administrators into contact with new and unfamiliar cultures, peoples generally unhappy to be the objects of conquest and the projection of maritime power. A history of woeful oppression, slavery, exploitation and very gradual liberation fills the pages of a thousand history books. But the cannier or luckier women of indigenous elites were sometimes able to finesse foreigners’ policies to their own advantage, in the process becoming enshrined in European written narratives of conquest, conversion and imperial rule.

  Queen Njinga of Ndongo

  Njinga Mbande (1582–1663), scion of a dynasty competing for power in what is now Angola in southwest Africa, forged a brilliantly successful political career by exploiting existing rules of power and patronage in a new and expanding world – just as Empress Wu had in Imperial China. She was not the first African queen but she is, very likely, the first whose story can be told in outline and whose own words have come down to us. More than ten of her diplomatic letters survive.

  By the time of Njinga’s birth, the vast country south of the equatorial kingdom of Kongo had been on the radar of Portuguese explorers, traders and proselytising Jesuits for a hundred years. Their settlement at Luanda on the Atlantic coast dates from about 1575, when it was established with the arrival of a garrison of 400 soldiers and 100 Portuguese families, keen to exploit rich silver deposits and a ready supply of slaves for shipment to transatlantic colonies in Brazil. Ndongo, the territory south and east of Luanda along the Cuanza River, was one of a number of tribal kingdoms subject to the overlordship of Kongo. It is thought to have been home to about 100,000 people at the start of the seventeenth century, with settlements of villages clustered around small towns, each ruled by a petty chief: a souba.

  During the sixteenth century, kings of Ndongo had courted Portuguese military support in the hope of throwing off Kongan overlordship. But after the foundation of Luanda, its captain-governor, Paulo Dias de Novais, formed alliances with both Kongo and Ndongo rulers and operated as a quasi-autonomous mercenary warlord. A series of conflicts followed, during which Portuguese exploitation of regional rivalries allowed them to establish a coastal province and intervene with increasing effectiveness in Angolan politics.

  By 1617 a Portuguese army was able to sack Ndongo’s inland capital at Kabasa and force its king, Ngola Mbande, into humiliating negotiations. Enter the king’s sister Njinga, sent to Luanda in 1622 to negotiate a treaty that allowed her brother to rule under Portuguese vassalage in return for an annual tribute of 100 slaves. Njinga stayed in Luanda for some months, underwent baptism and took the name Ana de Sousa.

  In 1624, after the suicide of her brother, Njinga acted as regent for her young nephew before, so it is said, having him killed. She was now elected queen by a powerful group of nobles; but rival factions declared her rule illegitimate and sided with the Portuguese in attempting to oust her. A year later, the forces under her personal command were defeated; she retreated to the highlands in the east while the Portuguese installed a rival, Hari, as puppet king in the west. In turn, Njinga forged a politically risky and compromising military alliance with the Jaga, a Spartan-like warrior caste prone to infanticide and blood sacrifice, alongside whom she prosecuted a savage ongoing war against the colonial power. Two campaigns against the Portuguese were unsuccessful; after the second she was forced to flee her island fortress on the Cuanza River in a desperate retreat. But she survived; and for the next thirty years Njinga fought to establish a new kingdom of Ndongo and Matamba in an ongoing struggle against Hari and his Portuguese sponsors.

  Acutely sensitive to her fragile legitimacy as a female ruler, during the 1640s Njinga symbolically ‘became a man’, keeping a harem of male concubines dressed in female clothes and personally leading her warriors into battle. She formed a battalion of her own ladies-in-waiting as a household guard. She impressed visiting Europeans with her skills in weaponry and her remarkable oratory. Her emissaries were able to recite long messages from her in sophisticated prose: verbal communiqués beyond the capabilities of the colonial audience.

  From the year 1626, two years after her brother’s death, we have a letter from Njinga to the military commander Bento Banha Cardoso, dictated to a functionary who translated it into Portuguese:

  On Saturday, one of my muenho* servants arrived here and told me that in Ambaca a large force had gathered, waiting for Your Honour to move against me to free the Portuguese held in captivity. Nothing is accomplished by force and to do so would bring both me and them harm because everything can be done peacefully and without force. And if some of the lords who have settled here have incurred heavy debts and have put it in the minds of Your Honour and the Governor that you should wage war in order to get out of debt, they are welcome to do so, but I do not want to make war with the captain…1

  Njinga was not to be cowed or manipulated. She showed that she had good intelligence of her opponents’ plans and that she was not easily misled by their manoeuvrings. She had, it seems, already become adept in constructing diplomatic narrative in the European style, countering accusations of perfidy with flattery, offer with demand, assuring him of her good intentions and ending, like many a diplomatic letter, with a disarming request:

  I ask that Your Honour send me a hammock, and four ells of red wool for a cover, a horse blanket, and good wine, and an arroba [about a third of a hundredweight] of wax for candles, and half a dozen lengths of muslin, and two or three lace tablecloths, and some purple, wine-coloured and blue garnets, and a large broad-brim hat made of blue velvet, or the one Your Honour wears, and four measures of paper.

  In the 1630s Njinga consolidated her rule in Ndongo and Matamba, inland from the Portuguese colony. During the next decade, Luanda was seized from Portuguese control by a Dutch force, and Njinga exploited the opportunity to forge an alliance with the new power, winning significant victories during the 1640s. Fortunes fluctuated. By 1655, when she wrote a very long letter (which survives) to the governor-general, Njinga was over seventy. Her faculties were undiminished but now, tiring of war, she opened up a new diplomatic initiative, which shows a touching preoccupation with the return of her sister, Doña Barbara, long held by the Portuguese as a hostage:

  I read that Your Lordship is in good health, which I hope Our Lord will increase for many long years, along with as much peace and tranquillity as I desire for myself… You stated your purposes with so much merit that I saw directly that you speak the truth in all you say. For I have many complaints about p
ast governors, who always promised to return my sister to me [and to whom] I have given an infinite number of slaves… Your Lordship would do me a great favour to send my sister back to me…2

  Njinga offers, as a carrot, her support in a Portuguese project to conquer the province of Qissama, south of the Cuanza River – a thing, she says, that no previous governor has earned the glory of accomplishing. She will dispatch a large force under one of her commanders to assist him; and further, if her sister is returned, she will abjure the heathen practices of her Jaga allies and hand over to the governor the Jaga leader Cabuco. The language is silky and artful, the very essence of diplomatique. Then comes the hard talk, in a voice sharpened by the bitter experience of betrayal…

  With respect to the two hundred slaves Your Lordship requested as ransom for my sister Doña Barbara, that is a very exacting price, particularly since I have already given the slaves Your Honour must know of to past governors and envoys, to say nothing of my gifts to secretaries and servants from your noble house and to many settlers whose treachery I still endure to this day. What I am so bold as to offer Your Honour is one hundred and thirty slaves, a hundred of whom I will send as soon as my sister reaches [the fort at] Ambaca. I will keep your envoy hostage until I can see with my own eyes my sister arriving in my court…

  And finally, in refined style, a conclusion sweetened with charm…

  The offering Your Lordship sent me, and for which I render you many thanks, was delivered to me by your envoy. I appreciated the mother-of-pearl goblet very much. Do not be weary of me, Your Lordship, but I want for nothing in my court. What I miss the most is my sister. Once she returns to me Your Lordship will see that I will serve Your Lordship much to your liking…

  A year later, after signing a new treaty with the colonial power that recognised the legitimacy of her rule of Ndongo and Matamba, Queen Njinga was re-accepted into the church. She fostered the presence of missionaries in her territories and was able, on her death at the age of eighty, to pass the kingdom on to her sister Doña Barbara. Over the course of the next century, four more queens were rulers of Ndongo and Matamba. In twentieth-century Angola, riven by civil war and continued foreign exploitation of its natural resources, Njinga is an icon of liberation and the fight against oppression. A bronze statue of her stands in Luanda. She, and many other African rulers whose stories are even less easily told, serve to prick the myth propagated and maintained by the colonial powers that Africans were not capable of statesmanship or worthy of trust.

  Two native women: Malintzin and Anacaona

  The outstanding example of Queen Njinga in Ndongo stands in contrast to the experiences of two other women whose encounters with Europeans are known, albeit in fragmentary form, from the testimonies of the colonists. In Central America, Malintzin (c.1496–c.1529), a Nahua or Mexica of the Gulf Coast, had the misfortune to lose her father, a cacique or chieftain, during her youth. After her mother remarried and bore her new husband a son, Malintzin was given away, or traded, and seems to have become a sort of marketable chattel, eventually passing into the hands of the Spanish invaders of Hernán Cortés’s 1519 expedition, by whom she was baptised.

  Bernal Díaz del Castillo (1494–1584), one of Cortés’s soldiers who wrote a self-serving True History of the Conquest of New Spain, was immediately struck by Malintzin’s beauty and grace – he called her Doña Marina. But it also became apparent that, since she was bilingual in Mayan and in Nahuatl, and highly regarded among her native people, she might be of practical use to the invaders. Cortés began to employ her as an interpreter. She learned Spanish and became his indispensable aide. Contemporary indigenous drawings unfailingly show her at Cortés’s side and so we have, if not her portrait, then at least caricatures of her, dressed in native poncho, in the company of armed and armoured conquistadors.

  Bernal Díaz tells a story that indicates both her local influence in smoothing a path for the invaders and her magnanimity:

  Doña Marina was a person of great importance, and was obeyed without question by all the Indians of New Spain. And while Cortés was in the town of Coatzacoalcos, he summoned all the caziques of that province in order to address them on the subject of our holy religion, and the good way in which they had been treated; and Doña Marina’s mother and her half-brother Lazaro were among those who came… Both she and her son were very much afraid of Doña Marina; they feared that she had sent for them to put them to death, and they wept. When Doña Marina saw her mother and half-brother in tears, she comforted them, saying that they need have no fear… She pardoned the old woman, and gave them many golden jewels and some clothes.3

  Malintzin – or La Malinche, as she came to be called† – won an enduring but unattractive reputation among some Mexican tribes as a traitor, when she warned Cortés of a native uprising against his army. Later, like all good interpreters, Malintzin learned her own diplomatic skills. According to Bernal Díaz, who says he was present, she was with Cortés when he and his captains captured Moctezuma II (1460–1520), the great Aztec emperor, in his palace at Tenochtitlán (now Mexico City). During an angry discussion among the Spanish, several of whom wanted to kill him on the spot, the emperor asked Malintzin what they were saying:

  …she, being very quick-witted, replied, ‘Lord Moctezuma, I advise you to accompany them immediately to their quarters and make no protest. I know they will treat you very honourably as the great prince you are. But if you stay here, you will be a dead man…’4

  In the event, the emperor seems to have been pelted to death by his own people. Malintzin’s loyalty to Cortés during this period went beyond confidential intelligence: she became his lover and in 1522, after the dramatic conquest of the Aztec capital at Tenochtitlán, she bore a son, Martín. He is regarded as one of the first mestizos – of mixed European and indigenous ancestry.‡ Cortés built Malintzin a house just a few miles away at Coyoacán and she lived there for two or three years before accompanying him on an expedition to put down a rebellion in Honduras, leaving her son behind in the care of a Cortés cousin. We know that some time later she married a Spanish nobleman at Orizaba in Veracruz; she is variously supposed to have died in 1529, or in the 1550s.

  Since her subsequent career was lived outwith the army of conquest and therefore beyond the horizon of Díaz’s narrative, nothing more is known of Malintzin, but her son, Martín, was taken to Spain by his father in about 1528. Years later he returned to the place of his birth but was forced into exile after being implicated in a plot to overthrow the Spanish authorities. He survived to marry and have two children. His mother’s place in Mexican history is variously portrayed as that of a collaborator, a semi-mythical embodiment of female virtues and a partisan, reinvented for each generation as a negotiable, ambivalent metaphor for the New World’s relations with the Old.

  A quite different, and more damning, Spanish account of interaction with a native population comes from the pen of a Dominican friar, Bartolomé de las Casas (1474–1566), whose experiences in Cuba in the 1510s turned him very much against his fellow countrymen, whom he was to accuse of atrocities and genocide. Of the many cruelties he recorded from the testimony of witnesses, few resonate so loudly as the story of Anacaona (1474–1503), a Taino cacique who ruled one of the five chiefdoms of the island of Hispaniola (now Haiti in the west and the Dominican Republic in the east) in partnership with her brother Behechio.

  Their first substantial experience of European intentions came in 1496, a mere four years after Cristóbal Colón’s (Christopher Columbus’s) voyage of exploration to the Indies. His brother, Bartolomé, had been appointed Adelantado, or governor, under licence from King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Castile. But the Spanish hold on the island was tenuous, frequently under threat from disease, food shortages and local resistance. Constantly on the move to find less hostile territory and new resources to support themselves, Colón’s party marched west towards the long Xaraguá peninsula. They were met by the army of the cacique Behechio whose sister, Ana
caona, was married to the chief of a neighbouring territory – the sort of political alliance that in Anglo-Saxon England would have made her a peace-weaver. In Xaraguán society, according to the early Spanish chroniclers, royal heirs were chosen from the sons of the cacique’s sister, giving her a peculiarly powerful status.§

  The welcome afforded to Colón’s force was promising, with elaborate rituals and gifts on display, guaranteed to oil the wheels of diplomacy and, perhaps, to ensure Spanish support in the internal politics of the island:

  Out came infinite people and many seniores and nobility, whose seats were of all the province of the king Behechio and the queen, his sister, Anacaona, singing their songs and dancing their dances, which they called areytos, things that were very pleasant and agreeable to see, especially when their numbers were great. Out came thirty women, who were kept as wives of the king Behechio, all completely naked, only covering their private parts with half-skirts of cotton, white and very elaborate in their style of weaving, which they call naguas, which cover from the belt to the middle of the leg; they were carrying green branches in their hands, singing and dancing and jumping with moderation, as is suitable for women, and showing great peace, delight, happiness, and the spirit of a party. They all arrived in front of Don Bartolomé Colón, and they went down on their knees on the earth, with great reverence, and gave him the branches and palms which they carried in their hands…5

  The Spaniards were billeted in the houses of Behechio’s village, set around a formal plaza with his own house, the largest, maintained as a place of feasting. Evidently the hospitality was both lavish and sexually generous. The following day, festivities were held: ball games, dancing and a mock battle, which got alarmingly out of hand and resulted in some nasty injuries. Afterwards, the two parties sat down to formal business: