Ndongo and Matamba, 1600–1660

Mbande a Ngola ruled Ndongo from Kabasa through his lords, the sobas, and every soba who swore to the Portuguese took his soldiers, tribute and people with him. Soon after the fort at Cambambe went up, 70 km from his capital, he sent envoys to Luanda and made peace in 1604. In 1611 he broke it, raiding the inland markets and the Portuguese traders at them.

João Rodrigues Coutinho landed at Luanda in January 1602 with the largest force yet sent to Angola. He reinforced Massangano and marched inland against the soba Cafuxi Cambari, but fever drove him back to Massangano, where he died in August 1603. His will named Manuel Cerveira Pereira to succeed him.

Cerveira Pereira beat Cafuxi Cambari that August and, to his allies' anger, spared him in return for his oath of vassalage. In 1604 he took the Cambambe district, whose rumoured silver mines held only lead, and built a fort there with 250 men. When Ndongo's envoys asked for peace, his captains voted to end the war.

Manuel Pereira Forjaz governed during the peace with Ndongo, while the forts and the vassal sobas around them stayed where the war had left them. He died suddenly in his bed on 11 April 1611, and the bishop and the colony's leading men called on the captain-major Bento Banha Cardoso to govern.

When the ngola's men raided the markets, Cardoso took Imbangala warlords into Portuguese pay, by most accounts in 1611, and marched on Ndongo. He beheaded the sobas Kilonga and Mbamba Tungu, relieved Cambambe when fourteen sobas of Ndongo and Matamba besieged it, built a fort at Ambaca by the Lucala, and by 1614 counted 78 sobas as Portugal's vassals.

Back as governor in 1615, Cerveira Pereira spent a year and a half fighting sobas north of the Kwanza while Cardoso went back to commanding the field army. On 1 April 1617 he handed Luanda to a deputy and sailed south, where he founded the fort of São Filipe de Benguela.

The Imbangala were war-bands from south of the Kwanza, living in fortified camps, the kilombos, that grew by taking in captured youths rather than by birth. Their name for ferocity and cannibalism went ahead of them. Hired by the governors from Cardoso's time, they sold their captives to the slave traders and became the colony's shock troops.

Early in 1617 Mbande a Ngola was killed by his own men, and his son Ngola Mbandi seized the throne before the electors met. He killed a half-brother and his family, the court's major-domo, many officials and Njinga's young son, then turned away the Portuguese envoys and raised an army to attack the colony.

With his army broken at Ambaca, Ngola Mbandi abandoned Kabasa and took refuge on the Kindonga islands in the Kwanza. Columns came back in 1619 and 1621, taking his mother and wives; 190 sobas swore to Portugal and thousands of his people were shipped as slaves. When the next governor sent two African priests to propose talks, he chose his sister as envoy.

In Luanda in 1622 Njinga asked for the fort at Ambaca to be withdrawn, Ndongo's captured people returned and Kasanje's band driven off. She was baptised Ana de Sousa, with the governor as godfather, and her sisters were baptised too. She went home with a treaty, and in 1623 led a second embassy, with her sisters, to greet the next governor.

The Portuguese kept Ambaca and went on raiding. Ngola Mbandi, who had won back Kabasa in 1623, sank into depression and left more of the government to Njinga. He died on the islands early in 1624: Fernão de Sousa's memoir says suicide, while his reports to Lisbon raised poison by Njinga.

Luís Mendes de Vasconcelos landed on 27 August 1617 meaning to conquer Ndongo. He enlisted three Imbangala squadrons he had at first refused, re-founded the fort of Ambaca, and routed the army of Caita Calabalanga, the last great soba loyal to the king, when it besieged the fort. His army entered Kabasa in January 1618; then, ill, he went back to Luanda.

João Mendes de Vasconcelos fought on for three months against Caita Calabalanga and captured him with 94 other sobas. Then he turned east against Kasanje's band, which had begun raiding Portuguese land, but it slipped away into the bush. His father's columns went back into Ndongo in 1619 and 1621, and a letter of March 1621 reports a town in Matamba sacked.

João Correia de Sousa had Vasconcelos arrested, judged the war with Ndongo not worth pursuing and sent two African priests to propose peace. The treaty he made with Njinga promised Ambaca's withdrawal and a campaign against Kasanje. Then he invaded Kongo; after his army was routed at Mbanda Kasi he was deposed in 1623.

Simão de Mascarenhas, bishop of Congo and Angola, governed in 1623–24 after Correia's fall and the short term of Pedro de Sousa Coelho. He sought reconciliation with Kongo and fought Imbangala bands, but the forts stayed, Ambaca with them, and the treaty with Ndongo went unfulfilled. He died in Luanda in October 1624.

Mubanga was one of the Ndongo lords who backed the Portuguese and Imbangala invasion of 1617 and swore vassalage to Portugal after it. With the faction of Hari a Kiluanje, these lords hostile to Ngola Mbandi gave the governors a party inside Ndongo.

Hari a Kiluanje, lord of the rock fortress of Pungo Andongo, came from a rival line of the royal family. He was among the dissatisfied Ambundu lords who joined Vasconcelos in 1617. The governor's attempt after the fall of Kabasa to set up a puppet king, António Correia Samba a Ntumba, failed; Hari's line waited.

Kasa led one of the three Imbangala squadrons Vasconcelos enlisted in 1617, baptised as João Cassa ca Angola, and fought in the army that took Kabasa. By 1619 he had broken with the Portuguese and gone over to Ndongo, and Ngola Mbandi gave him his young son and heir to train and protect.

Kasanje, baptised João Cassange, led the strongest band. It soon turned on the Portuguese and raided Ndongo and the colony alike, and Njinga's treaty called for a campaign against it. The Portuguese broke it and executed its leader at Luanda in May 1622; the survivors moved east to the Kwango lowlands and founded the kingdom of Kasanje.

Donga led the third squadron and refused the baptism the other two leaders accepted. His band fought in the campaign that broke Ndongo's army outside Ambaca and opened the road to Kabasa, where the Imbangala wrecked the town and cut down its palm groves.

Njinga took power as regent for her brother's young son, then had the boy killed and ruled herself. She signed as Senhora, Lady, until a letter of 3 March 1626, the first in which she called herself Rainha, Queen. She demanded Ambaca and Ndongo's people back, and urged the colony's slaves and farmers to run to her.

Cardoso's army besieged the Kindonga islands from April 1626; after two months, with disease in the camps, Njinga slipped out on 12 July. In November 1627 she offered to become Portugal's vassal if it backed her claim; the Portuguese beheaded her chief envoy and told her to submit to Ngola Hari. She fought on, always on the move.

In 1629 a Portuguese column destroyed Njinga's camp. She escaped east down the cliffs into the Kwango valley, but her sisters Funji and Kambu were taken to Luanda. Kambu was let go in 1632–33; Funji stayed a prisoner inside the colony for the rest of her life.

Fernão de Sousa took office in July 1624 and first beat off a Dutch attack on Luanda. He would not return Ndongo's people until Njinga sent back the colony's runaways, demanded that she become Portugal's vassal and pay tribute, and pressed her sobas to swear to Portugal. When she refused, he backed Hari a Kiluanje and declared war on 15 March 1626.

Cardoso relieved Pungo Andongo when Njinga besieged it, took the submission of Ndongo's lords for Hari a Kiluanje, and in April 1626 laid siege to her on the Kindonga islands. He hunted her for two more years and died in August 1628.

Paio de Araújo de Azevedo took the field command in 1628. In 1629 his column overran Njinga's camp and captured her sisters; on 29 May, hearing that she had fled east down the cliffs with the help of the Songo people, he gave up the pursuit.

Hari a Kiluanje would not accept a woman as ngola. Late in 1625 Portuguese soldiers came to protect him, and a force Njinga sent against him was beaten. In March 1626 the Portuguese made him king; Njinga besieged Pungo Andongo and Cardoso relieved it. During the siege of the Kindonga islands he died of smallpox.

Fernão de Sousa crowned Ngola Hari himself at Pungo Andongo, as Dom Filipe de Sousa. With few soldiers of his own he leaned on Portuguese troops, and many in Ndongo despised him as a puppet, but the great lords around him gave Portuguese Angola a king of its own inside Ndongo.

Njinga allied with Kasa, by most accounts marrying him, and he handed over the boy in his keeping, whom she had killed. As his 'first wife' she took the Imbangala title of tempaza. By 1629 Kasa and the other southern Imbangala had gone over to Luanda, and she lost the islands' last defenders.

Deserted by Kasa, Njinga turned to Kasanje's Imbangala on the Kwango; their partnership, about 1629–31, broke because each meant to dominate the other. She took up Imbangala rites and laws and built her army as a war-camp, a kilombo, that took in runaway slaves, exiles from Ndongo and captives, and promoted its fighters by merit.

Njinga a Mona was a man of Ndongo captured as a boy and raised by the Imbangala. Of humble birth, he rose by Imbangala rules to be her most senior commander; she adopted him, and his name means 'child of Njinga'.

Mwongo Matamba ruled Matamba, a kingdom with a tradition of queens that Portuguese raids had left in disarray. In 1631 Njinga defeated and captured her. She had her branded but spared her life, took her daughter into her service, and made Matamba her own kingdom.

From Matamba Njinga settled her followers, sold captives to the slave traders to pay for her wars, and raided the Portuguese and their allies. She sent occasional peace offers to Luanda, but only on terms that returned her to Ndongo, and she refused to be taken back into the Church.

Pedro César de Meneses arrived as governor on 18 October 1639 with reinforcements. He wrote to Njinga about the slaves who had fled the colony to her and about an embassy she had sent to Luanda, and he sent an envoy of his own to her court.

Gaspar Borges de Madureira, a settler and a friend of the Jesuits, went to Njinga's court in 1639 with the priest António Coelho and stayed about six months. His mission reached no treaty but reopened relations. Seven years later he would lead the army that routed her.

Through the 1630s Ngola Hari held Ndongo's heartland from Pungo Andongo for Portugal, with the lords who had backed his line. Njinga's raids fell on his people as well as on the colony's, and his court kept the Portuguese claim to Ndongo alive.

The Imbangala who had settled on the Kwango under Kasanje became Njinga's bitter rivals once the partnership broke, and fought her, notably in 1634–35. The Portuguese courted them: in 1639 they signed a treaty of peace and alliance with Kasanje.

Cornelis Jol, admiral of the Dutch West India Company, landed some 2,000 troops near Luanda on 25 August 1641 and took the city; Benguela had fallen in February. Portugal had just broken away from Spain, but the Company's war went on, and the colony lost its port and its link to the sea.

Garcia II of Kongo allied with the Dutch on 28 March 1642 and with them routed a Portuguese force that September, and Njinga's camp at Kavanga was soon in touch with his court. But her conquest of Wandu, a rebel Kongo province, offended him, and the Dutch had to keep peace between their two allies.

Cornelis Nieulant, one of the Company's directors at Luanda, signed a truce with Meneses on 30 January 1643, when both sides were short of food and the slaves the Dutch had hoped for were slow to come. Garcia, outraged, left the alliance. The truce broke within four months, and Nieulant died that June.

Njinga sent envoys to the Dutch at once and made an alliance, trading slaves for guns. She moved her camp to Kavanga, north of the Portuguese forts, from where she threatened Ambaca, and between 1641 and 1644 won back much of Ndongo as its nobles came over to her.

Njinga a Mona led her army west into the Dembos to open a road to the coast; most of its chiefs submitted, and one who resisted was crushed. At Kavanga in 1646 he commanded her army in the field.

Funji had spent the 1630s in Portuguese hands. Moved with the colony to Massangano, she sent Njinga the Portuguese plans in secret letters, a channel that ran until Njinga's papers were captured at Kavanga.

Kambu, freed in the early 1630s, had rejoined her sister. When Madureira's army routed Njinga at Kavanga early in 1646 she was captured again, and with her Njinga's papers, which showed the alliance with Kongo and Funji's letters.

Meneses evacuated Luanda on 26 August 1641 and led the settlers to Massangano, which they reached in December. Holding Massangano, Muxima and Ambaca with Ngola Hari and Imbangala allies, he was seized by the Dutch on 17 May 1643, when a truce broke down, and held until late that year; the colony governed itself from the forts.

Francisco de Souto-Maior, until then governor of Rio de Janeiro, landed south of Luanda in October 1645 with about 260 soldiers and marched to Massangano. He turned first on Njinga, declaring war on the Dutch in March 1646 and sending Madureira and Ngola Hari's archers against her camp.

Madureira routed one of Njinga's raiding forces at the Bengo, then marched on her camp. At Kavanga, with 330 Portuguese foot, 16 horse and over 20,000 African auxiliaries, he broke her army; she escaped, but the camp, her sister and her papers were taken.

Ngola Hari stayed loyal to the Portuguese cut off at Massangano. At Kavanga his Ambundu archers held the left flank and rear, where Njinga's attack fell hardest, and helped turn it into a rout.

Njinga's papers, taken at Kavanga, exposed Funji's letters. By most accounts the Portuguese drowned her in the Kwanza in 1647, though one tradition holds that she survived. Kambu, held at Massangano, was now the sister whose fate would shape every negotiation.

Njinga refused peace after Kavanga and won Dutch soldiers to her side. On 25 November 1647 her army and the Dutch routed the Portuguese and Ngola Hari's men at Kombi, north of Massangano, and she laid siege to Massangano, Ambaca and Muxima. When the Dutch gave up Luanda in August 1648, she lifted the sieges and fell back to Matamba.

After Kombi, Njinga a Mona led the attack on Massangano, where Kambu was held. Without cannon he could not break the walls, though the Portuguese holding the besieged forts numbered no more than 300.

Souto-Maior died of disease on 19 May 1646, and the settlers elected a council of three to govern: Bartolomeu de Vasconcelos da Cunha, António Teixeira de Mendonça and João Zuzarte de Andrade. With supplies running out, Mendonça led a column toward the sea; the Dutch threw it back near the Lucala.

Salvador de Sá sailed from Rio de Janeiro in May 1648 with eleven ships. Off Luanda he bombarded the fort, and on 24 August the Dutch, with most of their soldiers away fighting beside Njinga, surrendered; they sailed away and their field force went with them. He stayed on as governor.

After Kavanga the Company sent soldiers inland to fight beside Njinga, about 400 of them at Kombi. In August 1648 Thijmen Pietersen led a Dutch and Matamba force to another victory over the Portuguese. Returning to find Luanda surrendered, he accepted the capitulation and embarked with his men, leaving Njinga's army behind.

Ngola Hari's warriors fought for Portugal at Kombi and were routed with it. Through the sieges that followed his thousands of men helped the Portuguese hold Ambaca, Massangano and Muxima until the fleet came.

Nearly seventy and childless, Njinga wanted Kambu back as her heir, and Salvador de Sá would not make peace on her terms. From 1650 she wrote to the Capuchins in Luanda asking for missionaries. Fearing that the Imbangala in her army might one day put Njinga a Mona on her throne, she looked to Portugal and the Church to secure her line.

In 1655 Njinga a Mona's army, raiding a Kongo vassal, carried off a crucifix, which he ordered thrown into the bush. After a dream in which it threatened him, he sent Mbari a Ngonga to fetch it and brought it to Njinga, who received it as a sign and set it on an altar at her court.

Mbari a Ngonga, the officer who fetched the crucifix, became one of Njinga's envoys in the bargaining with Luanda. He signed the instrument of peace on 15 January 1657 as Bariangonga.

Kambu reached Massangano on 9 April 1656 and Ambaca on 2 May, where she was held until the last thirty slaves of her ransom arrived. She came to Njinga's court on 12 October 1656, eleven years after her second capture, and that day the peace terms were accepted.

Salvador de Sá won back the sobas who had sided with the Dutch and made peace with Kasanje and, in April 1649, with Kongo, but not with Njinga, who demanded Kambu first. He invited Capuchins from Kongo to Luanda and sent Rui Pegado to her court with a royal pardon.

Rui Pegado carried letters from the king and the governor offering Njinga pardon for her Dutch alliance; she received them with ceremony and sent excuses to the king. Sá's own letter of 13 April 1651 urged her to give up Imbangala customs. Kambu was not returned, and no peace followed.

Sousa Chichorro was a nephew of João Correia de Sousa, her godfather, and Njinga said the house of Sousa had killed her and given her back her life. She asked him for Kambu, a priest and peace. His council argued for fourteen months; he settled, by Cavazzi's account, for a ransom of 130 slaves, with 70 more to officials, and on 1 April 1656 wrote that Kambu would go.

Manuel Fróis Peixoto reached Njinga's court on 2 December 1655 and won her trust. When Kambu was held at Ambaca for the missing slaves and Njinga's priests called it a Portuguese trick, she threatened to kill him; he sent for Gaeta to calm the court.

Calixto Zelotes dos Reis Magos, a Kongo priest or interpreter, was captured when Njinga's army invaded Wandu in 1648. She spared him and kept him at her court, where he rose to be her secretary and later her confessor, and looked after the Christian objects she had taken in war.

Serafino da Cortona came from Kongo to run the Capuchin hospice Salvador de Sá opened in Luanda, and as prefect of the mission received Njinga's letters. When the governor wrote to him in April 1656 that Kambu would go home, he chose Antonio da Gaeta to go with her.

Antonio da Gaeta went with Kambu's escort in 1656. Called from Ambaca when the ransom quarrel threatened the deal, he travelled twenty days, ill with fever, to Matamba, where Njinga showed him the crucifix on its altar. He calmed the court, saw the ransom completed, and stayed as its missionary.

Under the treaty of 12 October 1656 Njinga gave up the Dembos, opened Matamba to Portuguese traders and missionaries and kept her throne with Portugal's recognition; Portugal promised help if Kasanje or Ngola Hari attacked her. On 31 January 1657 she threw down her bow before her army. She named Kambu her heir and built churches at her capital.

Dom Salvador, by Gaeta's account one of her slaves and a general in her army, married Njinga in a Christian ceremony early in 1657, over her chief counsellors' objections. The marriage ended the concubines of her war years and showed her court the Christian life she now asked of her subjects.

João Guterres Ngola Kanini, of a branch of Ndongo's royal line, had been captured by Njinga's forces in the 1640s and made head of her household. She wanted him to marry Kambu, but he already had a wife at Ambaca, where he had once been held; Gaeta objected, and the Church refused the match.

Kambu married Njinga a Mona instead. He was baptised in 1657, the first of Njinga's officials to be, with the Massangano captain José Carrasco as godfather; but he led the court's Imbangala faction, and the heir's husband was the army's chief.

Sousa Chichorro's treaty was signed with Njinga's envoy on 15 January 1657, and on 24 November the crown, in the name of the young Afonso VI, ratified the end of the war. In June 1657 he declared war on Kongo, then pulled back when Garcia II promised to keep his treaty. He handed over in April 1658.

João Fernandes Vieira, a leader of the rising that had driven the Dutch from Pernambuco, governed Angola from April 1658 and inherited the peace he had not made. He wrote to Njinga, and under him the colony turned its army and Ngola Hari's warriors against the lords of Kisama.

Bartolomeu de Vasconcelos da Cunha, once of the 1646 council and acting governor in 1653–54, led the 1658 campaign against the Kisama lord Angolomem-a-Caita with about 400 soldiers and thousands of auxiliaries. After a six-month siege the starving defenders surrendered.

Ngola Hari led his warriors for Portugal in the Kisama campaign of 1658. He still ruled the heart of Ndongo from Pungo Andongo as Portugal's vassal, while Njinga ruled Matamba and kept her claim to Ndongo.

Gaeta turned the treaty's promises into a church: he pressed Njinga to give up Imbangala rites, founded a lay confraternity in 1657 or 1658, and in her illness of 1657 replaced the charms at her neck with a paper dedicated to the Virgin. He later wrote the first life of Njinga, published in 1669.

Giovanni Antonio Cavazzi reached Luanda in 1654 and served at Ngola Hari's court at Pungo Andongo, so he knew both Ndongos; at Ambaca he helped prove Guterres's earlier marriage. Late in 1660 he came to Njinga's court; from 1662 he stayed, and he wrote the fullest account of her life.