Warrior Queens

by Antonia Fraser

  Jinga’s task was to negotiate the independence of Ndongo from the Portuguese, and at the same time to enlist their help in expelling the Imbangalas from the Ndongo kingdom. It is generally agreed that Jinga conducted these negotiations skilfully although certainly not as one raising her voice ‘for suppliant humanity’ (as that watered-down Zenobia was purported to do in the eighteenth century: the real Zenobia had much more in common with Queen Jinga). Perceiving for example, in the desire of the Portuguese to baptize her, a possible entry into their favour, she allowed herself to add to her armoury of names with that of Anna de Sousa (in honour of the incoming Governor Correira de Sousa). Her sisters, who would show themselves, like Jinga, wily and intelligent characters, became the Ladies Grace and Barbara respectively.

  In 1624 Jinga’s brother the Ngola died under mysterious circumstances: possibly he committed suicide, but possibly also Jinga had him killed.24 Whatever the truth – and legend credited Jinga with another murder at the same time, that of her nephew, with the additional titillating accusation that she subsequently ate his heart – it was certainly Jinga who benefited from these demises, since she now assumed power. Unlike Pocahontas, who remained ‘the Lady Rebecca’, the Angolan princess now renounced her convenient Christianity. Anna de Sousa was no more; Queen Jinga was born.

  The next important stage in the story of this ‘redoubtable Amazon’, as C. R. Boxer has called her, was reached when the Portuguese declared war upon her.25 They did so reluctantly. A tacit peaceful alliance in the business of producing and shipping slaves was infinitely more desirable. Queen Jinga however played by her own rules. In the end the Portuguese preferred to set up a puppet chief from another tribe on the Ndongo throne, and Jinga was driven out. The loyalty of her Mbandi people however remained steadfast: the puppet kings were scorned as the sons of slaves on the one hand, inadequate rainmakers on the other. And in 1630 Queen Jinga made an alliance with the neighbouring Kasanje kingdom, which had the effect of closing the vital slave routes to the Portuguese.

  The Queen then led her people further east to the kingdom of Matamba, where she conquered the indigenous Jaga tribe, acquiring not only a useful base, but also the ferocious rituals associated with its members. The Jagas themselves have been described as indulging in cannibalism ‘not merely as a ritual sacrifice, but as a matter of habit, convenience and conviction’. They also indulged in deliberate infanticide, in order to preserve the hardy nature of the tribe, turning for replenishments of their population to the children of their conquered enemies.26

  Queen Jinga, following her take-over of the Jagas, indulged in the first practice, at least in public and at least for ritual effect. As it happens, we have an eyewitness account of the Queen as she appeared to the Dutch captain of her bodyguard, during her wars against the Portuguese in the late 1640s.27 Captain Fuller, who was in command of sixty men put at the Queen’s service for a period of years, referred to the deep importance attached to her by people: rumours of her death – the death of the Holy Figurehead – were always concealed from the Portuguese lest they take too much heart from them.

  More crucially, he also witnessed Queen Jinga performing a ritual sacrifice. She wore, as she always did, ‘man’s apparel’ for the occasion. She was also hung about with ‘the skins of Beasts, before and behind’, had a sword about her neck, an axe at her girdle and a bow and arrows in her hand. This awesome figure proceeded to leap ‘according to the custom, now here, now there, as nimbly as the most active among her attendants’ (Queen Jinga would by this date have been well over sixty). All the while she continued to strike the two iron bells which she used instead of drums. ‘When she thinks she has made a show long enough, in a masculine manner … then she takes a broad feather and flicks it through the holes of her bored Nose, for a Sign of War.’ This sinister gesture was the prelude to the first sacrifice: Queen Jinga selected the first victim, cut off his head and drank ‘a great draught of his blood’.

  As for male company, the Queen had evidently adopted that second practice of the Jagas: infanticide. According to Fuller, she kept fifty or sixty young men instead of husbands, who were in turn allowed as many wives as they pleased, ‘with the proviso that if any became with child, they must kill the infant’. Jinga was also described as going further and clothing selected young men in women’s clothes (shades of Radegunde, Spenser’s Queen of the Amazons, with her ‘unnatural order’ of knights holding distaffs!). The clothing of her obedient favourites, in the pretence that they had become women, as she herself had been transformed by her ‘man’s apparel’, enabled them to move freely among the other women of her household: ‘and if they fail in their obligations, they seldom escape to tell further news’.

  It is a vivid if intimidating picture. Yet as with the head-hunting of the Celts, and as with Boadicea’s chilling sacrifices to Andraste, one must be wary of condemning the Jagas and Queen Jinga outside the standards of their own time and society; one should bear in mind also the slave trading which was the quite open practice of the alternative officially ‘Christian’ cultures of the Portuguese and Dutch.

  In terms of the outside world at this date, Angola was indeed a mere pawn in the game played out between these two nations, each eager to supply much-needed slaves to the colonies of the New World. Its inhabitants were estimated as something lower than pawns: pieces without any significance so long as the supply was sufficient. About this time the captured Negroes destined for the slave ships and death, or a tormented exile of drudgery at best, were casually described by those responsible for their fate as ‘brutes without intelligent understanding’.28 That was not a description which anyone could or would have applied to Queen Jinga in the years of raiding against the Portuguese, aided by other tribes such as the Congolese and the Dembos, which followed.

  Nor was she herself a pawn. Whatever the cruelties of her own practice, like Boadicea Jinga did at least stand for the independence of her race in the person of at least one individual (a female, as it happened). ‘Every kind of display and power is necessary when dealing with this heathen’, wrote Antonio de Oliveira Cadornego, about twenty years after Jinga’s death;29 but the reverse was of course also true for the Africans dealing with the European ‘heathen’. In the late-twentieth-century meaning of the word, among so-called Mafia business organizations, Queen Jinga demanded and received ‘respect’.

  Captain Fuller’s verdict on her, for all her ‘Devilish Superstition and Idolatry’, her ritual sacrifices and bizarre sexual habits, is fundamentally a respectful one. She was, he wrote, ‘a cunning and prudent Virago, so much addicted to arms that she hardly uses other exercises; and withal so generously valiant that she never hurt a Portuguese after quarter given, and commanded all her slaves and soldiers alike’.30 This is perceptibly the tone of the British Caratach praising his Roman enemy as a comrade-soldier in Fletcher’s Bonduca; it is certainly not that of Caratach denouncing the Warrior Queen herself as a weak, boastful and shameless woman.

  In the end the Queen was responsible, if indirectly, for the defeat of the Portuguese at the hands of the Dutch, by which Luanda fell to the latter in 1641. Her tactical withdrawal to the interior had obliged the Portuguese to penetrate too far from their own base in search of their slave-prey. Queen Jinga was now pleased to make allies of the Dutch. She set up camp on the Dande river. From this vantage point she could both despatch caravans to the Dutch at Luanda – selling them her prisoners of war – and conduct a series of short campaigns on her own account, notably against the puppet monarch of Ndongo, Ngola Ari, and his Portuguese sponsors.

  In 1643 Queen Jinga’s forces routed the Portuguese outside Mbaka and there were further victories in 1647 and 1648. Unfortunately an intervening defeat inflicted by the Portuguese resulted in the capture of Jinga’s sister Mukumbu (to them the Lady Barbara), a considerable blow to one who had none of Queen Elizabeth I’s dislike of her own sex, but rather relied on the matriarchal family network. Jinga’s other sister Kifunji (the Lady Grace), long a
captive of the Portuguese, had justified the Queen’s faith in this network by supplying her with intelligence: in October 1647, Kifunji was drowned by the Portuguese as they retreated, either out of fear of her efforts or in retaliation.

  On 10 August 1648, in a reversal of the events which had led to the seizing of Luanda by the Dutch, the daring Brazilian landowner Salvador de Sa recaptured the town for the Portuguese. This time it was the presence of two hundred Dutch soldiers at Jinga’s side in her last victory of 1648 which had fatally weakened the garrison. With the return of Portuguese mastery to Luanda, Queen Jinga’s finest hour was over. Yet even now, where the Kongo state made peace on humiliating terms, Jinga herself was able to retreat back to her Matamba heartlands. Here she was able to lie low for a few years; since the prime concern of the Portuguese remained their slave trade, and that depended on milking the interior, finally they had more to gain from negotiating with Jinga than battling against her. It was however the continued captivity of Mukumbu at the hands of the Portuguese which ultimately persuaded Jinga to agree to an official peace in October 1656.

  One hundred and thirty slaves were formally exchanged for the person of ‘the Lady Barbara’, to be restored to her Mbundu persona for good. Other conditions imposed by the Portuguese were the establishment of ‘trade fairs’ along the borders of their Portuguese territories, and the introduction of a Christian mission into Matamba. In return ‘the ancient Virago’ – now in her seventies – was to receive military help when she required it. Lastly, in a settlement which was certainly to the advantage of most of the parties concerned, the Jagas were to abandon their notoriously savage habits: there was to be no more infanticide, for example, and although the women of the tribe were still compelled to give birth outside the war-camp, at least they could now bring up their offspring.

  This peace lasted until Queen Jinga’s death in 1663. After her death her corpse, still richly arrayed in the royal robes encrusted with precious stones, still clutching a bow and arrow in its hand, as though to symbolize the majesty and ferocity which were Jinga’s dominant qualities, was formally displayed to her subjects.31 They viewed it with a mixture of apprehension, awe and sorrow. All three reactions can surely be justified.

  Even in the short term, the effect of Queen Jinga’s rule was beneficial to the prosperity of Matamba – compared for example to the puppet kingdom of Ndongo, whose fortunes went rapidly downhill and which was eliminated altogether as an independent entity in 1671.32 Matamba benefited from the trade and the missions, and did not suffer direct European authority. In addition, there were the many long-term legacies of her career. The first of these was the undeniable ‘respect’ she had earned by her own capabilities. ‘History furnishes very few instances of bravery, intelligence and perseverance equal to the famous Zhinga, the Negro queen of Angola’: thus wrote Mrs Child in 1833, at the beginning of the American movement for the emancipation of slaves. Mrs Child, a liberal writer, issued An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans called Africans.33 She was concerned in particular to refute one contemporary argument against such an emancipation, that the Negroes lacked the natural ability of the white race. Although Mrs Child granted that Queen Jinga had been a despot, and granted that she had committed murderous acts, she still cited the Queen’s story as part of her impassioned plea, since her ability could hardly be doubted.

  Then there is the ‘pan-African’ element to Jinga’s rule, the fact that she did at certain points combine various tribes other than her own under her leadership (a leadership which in itself, being female, acts as an inspiration to a growing women’s movement). Lastly, of course, and most importantly, in the People’s Republic of Angola (established in 1975), there is the legacy of Jinga as the Warrior Queen who attempted gloriously but in vain to oust the Portuguese. Modern Angolan school textbooks naturally stress both of these aspects of Queen Jinga’s heroic career.* ‘She tried to unite the different peoples in the struggle against the foreign threat … After a few years of effort she succeeded in her aims, which were to unite the people of Ndongo, Matamba, Congo, Casnje, Dembos, Kissama and the Central Planalto. This was the greatest alliance ever formed to fight against the foreign colonialists.’ Even if Queen Jinga was not successful then, her ‘great dream did not disappear. Her idea of a union of the Angolan people in its struggle against colonialism is today realized.’

  Some modern Angolan students of history are beginning to assess Queen Jinga’s contribution more critically: such matters as her alliance with the Dutch, her co-operation at various stages with the Portuguese, her own involvement in the slave trade, even her own claim to the throne, are being subjected at least to scrutiny. On the other hand the best known of all the legends about the Queen explains the deathless quality of her popular image, and why it is not likely to be widely superseded.

  There are many variants of this story, but they unite in taking place in the course of that visit by Queen Jinga to the Portuguese Governor Correira de Sousa in the early 1620s in which her public career was inaugurated. They also unite in having the Governor seated on his throne, while Jinga was required to remain standing; whereupon Jinga, in a gesture at once characteristically bold and characteristically imperious, ordered one of her slaves to kneel on all fours to form a seat. After that she sat down. Did she refuse to take the slave away when she left the Governor’s mansion, saying that she would not remove the Governor’s furniture? Or did she refuse to remove the slave on the ground that she never sat on the same chair twice? Was the slave actually a maidservant? In one version, she even went as far as to have the slave (or maidservant) executed on the same ground: ‘I have no further use for him [or her].’

  The clear message of the story is the same in all its versions: even in her enforced national subjection, Queen Jinga’s personal pride was equal, even superior, to that of the Portuguese Governor. And this pride proved to be prophetic:

  Rome for empire far renown’d

  Tramples on a thousand states

  Soon her pride shall kiss the ground, –

  Hark! the Gaul is at her gates.

  Once again Cowper’s lines for a British Boadicea are more appropriate to another Warrior Queen in another country than they were to Britain – and British women – in the age in which he wrote them.

  * Bonduca is the name usually, but not invariably, employed in the seventeenth century, following Dio’s Greek; but frequent references to Boadicea, in all its rich variety of spellings, following Tacitus, also continue. (Howard himself cites both Voadicia and Boadicia before plumping for Bonduca.) To John Horsley in his Britannia Romana of 1732 has been ascribed the honour of settling the spelling generally in favour of Boadicea.14

  * These quotations (originally in Portuguese) are taken from a fourth-form history textbook in use in an elementary school in Luanda in 1987.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  QUEEN VERSUS MONSTER

  Let us fight the Monster, let us beat the Monster down

  Queen Louise of Prussia on Napoleon

  A woman with a pretty face, but little intelligence and quite incapable of foreseeing the consequences of what she does

  Napoleon on Queen Louise of Prussia

  Butterflies are not associated with battlefields (although they may actually be found there, fluttering incongruously amid the trampled corn and wildflowers of a long hot bloodstained summer’s day). Napoleon Bonaparte thought that women did not belong there either: he had a profound dislike of anything approaching the Amazon in womankind, and theoretically even intriguing women met with his censure. As he assured his first wife Josephine, he liked women to be ‘bonnes, douces et conciliantes’ and on another occasion ‘bonnes, naïves et douces’; adding, with more tact than accuracy, that that was because such good, sweet, naïve, soothing women resembled her.1

  The object of Napoleon’s disapproval was Queen Louise of Prussia. Ironically enough, she was by nature quite as gentle and submissive as the most exigent male could require, as well as being as lovely
a princess as ever won the heart of a king. It was cruel destiny – a destiny incarnated by Napoleon himself – which transformed this harmless and iridescent creature into a Warrior Queen ‘dressed as an Amazon’ as Napoleon termed her in 1806, in the uniform of her regiment of dragoons: writing twenty incendiary letters every day, ‘an Armida in her madness destroying her own palace with fire’. The reference was to Gluck’s opera Armide, popular with both French and Prussian audiences: it was in fact performed in Berlin for Louise’s own wedding day. The eponymous heroine was a princess of Damascus at the time of the First Crusade, founded on Tasso’s ‘wily witch’ in Jerusalem Delivered who, foiled of her lover, ended by calling on demons: ‘destroy this palace!’2

  Queen Louise’s tragedy, in one sense, lay in the fact that she found herself matched against a man whom the Queen and her circle were inclined to sum up in one simple expression of horror as the ‘Monster’. This was of course too simple a judgement: the real threat was not so much in Napoleon’s perceived monstrosity of nature as in the brilliance of his military talent. Even one of Louise’s staunchest confidantes ruefully admitted that war was Napoleon’s trade: ‘he understands it and we do not’.3

  But there was another deeper layer to Louise’s tragedy, which made of her a genuine martyr to her people’s own zeal at the time, as well as a patriotic heroine and martyr to the generations which followed. If Napoleon was indeed a monster, then it was optimistic at best to match the frail Queen Louise against him. Why did the fact that she emerged crushed from the encounter, failing to save Prussia from his depredations, generate surprise as well as despair? This was a development which must always have been expected along a level of common sense. The answer lies in the false but exciting expectations sometimes aroused in the human breast by the sight of one type of Warrior Queen: ‘sainted’ and ‘possessed of angelic goodness’ – descriptions freely applied to Queen Louise – this Holy Figurehead of the Prussian armies must surely bless her people with victory over the forces of evil.