*Njinga /Nazingha (meaning “twist” – as she was born with her umbilical cord curled around her neck), Warrior Queen of the Mbundu Kingdom (Angola, Africa), was the first-born daughter of Ndambi Kiluanji, the leader (Ngola) of the Mbundu Kingdom. She was born around 1582 as Portugal was making deeper and deeper incursions into Africa, attacking a salt mine and stealing people for the slave trade (shipping them in slave ships primarily to plantations in Brazil; as many as 13,000 – 16,000 annually by 1641). 

 As Njinga’s mother Kanjela, was from another tribe (and considered “jaga” – an outsider), her father married Kanjela and another woman from his tribe, to appease his people.  He had a son (Mbandi) with the other woman. The boy, by cultural standards of that time, was expected to succeed his father but proved unequal to the task.   Only males received educational instruction; but Njinga was taught by a captured Portuguese priest, Father Giovanni Gavazzi, and not only led her people in resistance to foreign colonization, but negotiated treaties with the Dutch and Portuguese.  To strengthen ties with the Portuguese, she had herself baptized Catholic and renamed Dona Ana de Sousa, after Governor de Sousa.

 See the work of Professor Linda Heywood, Boston University, author of Contested Power in Angola, editor & contributor to Central Africans: Cultural Transformations in the American Diaspora.  She is currently completing her book Queen Njinga: History, Memory and Nation in Angola and Brazil.