Njinga of Angola: Africa’s Warrior Queen by Linda M. Heywood (review)

Njinga of Ndongo (1582–1663) was born into a kingdom in declension. When her grandfather usurped power in the last quarter of the sixteenth century, the realm was very near its meridian. Then, Ndongo possessed an Atlantic border extending from the Bengo River in the north to the Kwanza in the south. It exercised suzerainty over a region extending more than 200 miles into the interior, and it projected cultural, political, and military power well into its territorial frontiers.

By the first third of the seventeenth century, however, Ndongo was very far indeed from its apogee. Much of the former western end of the realm was now better described as Portuguese Angola, while Ndongo proper persisted as a not insignificant but much reduced eastern rump. Now queen of this diminished Ndongo, Njinga found herself standing on a literal precipice in May of 1629, chased out of what remained of the kingdom while Portuguese colonial soldiers and her erstwhile vassals (now Portuguese allies) closed in, determined to end her reign, by taking her life if necessary. At this juncture, several hundred of Njinga’s soldiers formed a cordon about her, and, as a momentary standoff ensued, the queen of Ndongo performed a feat of astounding dexterity, intelligence, and power. The nearly 50-year-old queen (in a time and place where life expectancy was around 40 years) reached out toward the cliff face and rappelled into an impossible escape. Three hundred of her troops were not so fortunate.

Linda M. Heywood deftly chronicles the myriad negotiations, contentions, escapes, and transformations defining a remarkable ruler’s will to power in early modern west-central Africa. Njinga ruled in an age when the already complex nature and stakes of mastery in the region were complicated further by the arrival of hundreds of covetous adventurers from various far-flung states an ocean away. Heywood’s book is part colonial history centering on African resistance, collaboration, and manipulations of Portuguese and Dutch efforts at African dominion. In the span of her long life, Njinga was a greater foil than abettor of European power in west-central Africa. But even if she was easily more one than the other, she was still very clearly both. Heywood’s description and analysis of her career and of the careers of lesser African and European doyens in her orbit is an astute study in the dialectics of colonialism.

Njinga’s relationship with the strangers within her realm is not easily characterized as colonial, and Heywood’s story is not at its heart one of European conquest. In seventeenth-century west-central Africa, the Portuguese, the Dutch, and other Europeans were as much conquered as they were conquerors—especially when one considers the social and cultural realms alongside the military and political ones. Consequently, African sovereignty and Atlantic diplomacy and negotiation are major themes of the book.

Heywood’s success with centering Njinga in the theatrical, epistolary, and strategic worlds of transatlantic diplomacy is a hallmark of the volume. Dealing with Njinga’s efforts (during her brother’s reign) as a Ndongo ambassador to the Portuguese at Luanda, her near-constant subsequent machinations with an assortment of mercenary European governors, and the stratagems she devised later in her career to bring the Vatican and lesser Church officialdom within her orbit, Heywood’s life of Njinga is a careful, insightful study of the translation and exigencies of regional power in an Atlantic context.

Through Njinga’s biography, the book shines also as a social and cultural history of the region. The intersection at which tradition and the demands of the present meet forms a critical, illuminating locus of the book. Heywood’s attention to how Njinga and those around her, the Portuguese and other European sojourners included, negotiated the human crossroads at which they found themselves offers the reader compelling accounts of key social formations in the region that stress internal dynamics and tensions and change over time. For instance, the...