The Queen Who Said No: Nzinga’s Battle for Power
History calls her queen; memory calls her myth. Nzinga’s story redefines feminine sovereignty.
Of Gold & Goddesses: A Fifteen-Week Series - Only on The Lady Hour - Part 3 of 30
A Throne Made of Resilience
Picture this: a diplomatic meeting in 1622 between African royalty and Portuguese colonizers. A hall filled with tension, thick with the smell of gunpowder and ego. The Portuguese governor offers one chair… for himself. Queen Nzinga of Ndongo and Matamba arrives, regal in stature and silk, adorned in the quiet armor of confidence. She notices the calculated slight. No chair for her. No place at the table, literally.
But she doesn’t protest. She doesn’t flinch.
Instead, she signals to a servant, who kneels without hesitation. Nzinga sits on her back, poised and powerful. Now eye to eye with the governor.
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This wasn’t just a moment of quick thinking. It was strategy, theatre, resistance. Nzinga wasn’t just taking a seat, she was claiming space. In a single gesture, she collapsed the illusion of colonial superiority. She turned insult into iconography.
In the oral histories of the Mbundu people, this act is more than political—it’s sacred. It speaks to a deeper cultural value: that leadership isn’t about comfort. It’s about adaptability. Fluidity. Nzinga was a ruler who shapeshifted—between roles, languages, faiths—always anchoring herself in her people's survival.
European accounts often depict her as ruthless, cunning, even masculine—unable to reconcile her authority with femininity. But those labels reveal more about the colonizers than the queen. Nzinga didn’t defy gender norms to imitate men; she expanded them to include her.
This throne of resilience, built on the back of a loyal subject, wasn’t dehumanizing. It was a reminder: power, especially feminine power, doesn’t always come gift-wrapped. Sometimes, it is made—bodily, boldly—on the spot.
And that story still sits with us today.
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Gender, Power, and the Colonial Gaze
Born in 1583 to the royal family of Ndongo, in what is now Angola, Nzinga (also spelled Njinga or Zinga) was no ordinary princess. Her father, King Kiluanji, ensured she received an elite education, one taught in both Indigenous wisdom and the growing realities of European encroachment. She was trained in statecraft, military strategy, and diplomacy, skills not typically afforded to women, then or now.
But Nzinga’s rise was not merely a matter of talent. It was a response to the crisis.
By the early 1600s, the Portuguese had escalated their invasion of Central Africa, fueled by the insatiable demands of the transatlantic slave trade. Entire communities were razed. Alliances fractured. Sovereignty hung by a thread. When her brother – often described as erratic and politically cornered – died under mysterious conditions in 1624, many suspected foul play, possibly influenced or orchestrated by the Portuguese.
Nzinga did not wait for permission.
She seized the throne, not as a consort, not as a regent, but as the sovereign ruler of Ndongo. And she made it clear, she was not interested in performing femininity for the comfort of colonizers. She took on traditionally male titles, wore men’s clothing in formal settings, and referred to herself as king. This wasn’t gender confusion; it was gender disruption. A deliberate refusal to play by imported rules.
European chroniclers tried to contain her through language: calling her savage, masculine, unnatural. But their shock only confirms her defiance. Nzinga didn’t just challenge Portuguese expansion, she challenged their imagination. She was, for them, an enigma that didn’t fit colonial scripts about African women being docile, disposable, or invisible.
Nzinga’s power wasn’t an exception to her gender. It was an expansion of it. And through her, the limits of leadership and womanhood were forever rewritten.
Warfare as Strategy, Diplomacy as Art
Nzinga’s genius was not in brute force, but in strategic adaptability. She understood that survival required both sword and speech. At times, she made alliances with the Portuguese; at other times, she allied with the Dutch, their European rivals. She converted to Christianity when it suited her negotiations, then conducted spiritual rituals that predated colonization.
To some, this made her controversial. Was she a chameleon? A pragmatist? Or simply a queen doing whatever was necessary to keep her people free?
Scholars like Linda Heywood, in her authoritative work Njinga of Angola: Africa’s Warrior Queen (2017), argue that Nzinga's ability to move between roles – queen, warrior, diplomat, priestess – was not contradiction, but sophistication. In a colonial world designed to fracture and subdue African sovereignty, Nzinga’s adaptability was resistance. Her very survival was defiance.
The Gender of Power
Nzinga’s reign complicates Western assumptions about gender, leadership, and legacy. She blurred lines between male and female, sacred and political, warrior and nurturer. Some accounts describe her taking multiple male concubines. Others note that she adopted masculine titles and commanded her soldiers like a king.
This wasn’t performance. It was reclamation.
In the cosmology of the Mbundu people, from whom Nzinga descended, gender was never a fixed binary. It was relational, spiritual, and situational. Authority could be embodied by women, men, or those who occupied both roles, depending on what the moment required. Power, in other words, did not come dressed in one gender.
Colonial powers were deeply invested in projecting European gender norms onto African societies. They used femininity as a justification for conquest, positioning African women as needing to be “saved” or civilized. Nzinga shattered that framework. She ruled not despite her gender, but through it, stretching it, bending it, wielding it as a weapon and a shield.
To the Portuguese, she was dangerous because she refused to be legible. She was not a “woman king” or a “man in a dress.” She was simply sovereign.
And to her people, she embodied what had always been true: that leadership is not a matter of anatomy, but of alignment—of spirit, strength, and sacred duty.
Myth and Memory
Nzinga ruled for nearly 40 years, outlasting multiple Portuguese governors and reshaping the region's geopolitics. By the time of her death in 1663, she had carved out a stable kingdom in Matamba and had become a living legend.
But legends, especially those of women, are rarely left untouched.
Posthumously, Nzinga was both sanctified and sensationalized. Christian missionaries painted her as a pagan sorceress. Colonial writers reduced her to a bloodthirsty tyrant or exoticized her as a tragic heroine. Even African oral traditions sometimes elevate her into mythical terrain – Nzinga the immortal, the goddess, the ghost who never bowed.
This mythologizing is not simply distortion, it’s recognition. Nzinga was too large for the colonial archive to contain. Too contradictory for one version of history to hold. And perhaps that’s the point.
Nzinga isn’t here to comfort us. She’s here to complicate us.
Why Nzinga Matters Now
We live in an age of renewed attention to who gets remembered, how, and why. Monuments fall. Syllabi shift. New statues rise in the public square. Yet Nzinga has remained somewhat peripheral in global consciousness, despite her unmatched political acumen and revolutionary legacy.
Why?
Because Nzinga doesn’t fit neatly into the molds we often use for women in power. She wasn’t just a victim, or a feminist icon, or a mother of her people. She was all these and more. Her story is one of survival, not just hers, but that of her culture, her language, her people. She is evidence that African sovereignty did not simply collapse under colonization – it adapted, resisted, and reimagined itself.
In this way, Nzinga offers a blueprint. Not for replication, but for reflection.
She reminds us that sovereignty is not static. That leadership is not gendered. That real power often resides in those who are most underestimated.
A New Kind of Sovereignty
Nzinga’s legacy forces us to redefine what it means to rule. Not with domination, but with discernment. Not by fitting into a system, but by outsmarting it. She didn’t inherit a peaceful kingdom or ride the coattails of male predecessors. She inherited war, betrayal, and crisis, and turned them into tools for self-determination.
In many ways, Nzinga was not just a queen of Angola. She was a queen of refusal.
She refused erasure.
She refused submission.
She refused to let her story be written without her voice in it.
The Warrior Queen Lives On
Today, Nzinga lives not only in the pages of history books but in murals across Luanda, in the stories passed down through Angolan families, and in the global movement to reclaim African heroines. Her name is invoked in Pan-African circles, Black feminist theory, and liberation theology. Her face appears on banknotes and street signs.
But perhaps more importantly, Nzinga lives in the imaginations of women – especially Black women – who find in her not a perfect figure, but a possible one. A reminder that it is possible to be soft and sharp, spiritual and strategic, vulnerable and victorious.
In an era of burnout, crisis, and identity reckoning, Nzinga’s story is not just relevant, it’s urgent. We are all being asked, in different ways, to govern our lives with more clarity, creativity, and courage. Nzinga shows us that sovereignty is not just a political condition. It’s a state of being.
And perhaps that is the greatest legacy of the Unconquered Queen: Not that she ruled, but that she refused to be ruled.
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Works Cited:
Heywood, Linda M. Njinga of Angola: Africa’s Warrior Queen. Harvard University Press, 2017.
Thornton, John K. Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–1800. Cambridge University Press, 1998.
Miller, Joseph C. Way of Death: Merchant Capitalism and the Angolan Slave Trade, 1730–1830. University of Wisconsin Press, 1988.