CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Jinga at the Gates
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.
WILLIAM COWPER, ‘Boadicea’
When Queen Christina of Sweden, daughter of the warrior Gustavus Adolphus, expressed a wish to abdicate in 1651, it was to make room for her first cousin Charles Gustavus. She did so, she declared, in the best interests of her country: ‘The realm would be granted a man and a champion who when war threatened could ride with his people to battle, while a woman could not.’ (As we shall see, this passive estimate of a woman leader’s role in wartime was not shared at this date by Warrior Queens in other continents, where the thrilling or menacing practical involvement of the female in her country’s cause by one such as Jinga of Angola continued.) Although Christina was persuaded not to abdicate in 1651, three years later the eccentric scholarly creature, a convert to Catholicism, who had worn man’s clothing not with martial intent but for the freedom it gave her, departed for Rome. For all the legends which have her wearing Amazonian costume on this occasion, she and her ladies actually wore plain grey gowns to enter the Holy City.1
The particular intellectual temperament of Queen Christina – ‘You know how it distresses me to lend my time to matters other than studying’, she wrote – did not prevent her from taking part in various political intrigues in her new life in the south. But like many European queens regnant, she expressed the notion that participation in war was a masculine business. It is of this period that Joan Kelly has written of the phenomenon of the ‘disarmed lady’.2 Queen Elizabeth I, gamely acting the Warrior Queen at Tilbury despite a prudent natural pacifism, belonged to a vanished age. Then there were still relics of feudalism in the national unconscious, a vague expectation that the chief must personally wave the sword. Now a female ruler had no need to issue the fake if exciting threat that ‘I myself will take up arms’ in order to shore up her authority. A queen, no longer posing as an honorary male, could give vent to perceived natural feminine dislike of the actual battlefield, leaving the sword to be grasped by the nearest male. Queen Christina, publicly encouraging the trained soldier Charles Gustavus to take the sword away altogether, was merely carrying this trend to the extreme. He did so, incidentally, with alacrity, initiating a series of carnivorous campaigns of conquest.
‘Oh Lord, when will all this dreadful bloodshed cease?’ Thus with fervour exclaimed Queen Anne, reigning over Great Britain a century after the death of her kinswoman Elizabeth, a Britain in full spate of Marlborough’s victories. ‘I have no liking for war,’ she observed on another occasion, ‘and shall end it as soon as possible.’ She was indeed improbable even as a symbolic Warrior Queen, as has been noted with regard to her ‘Amazonian’ display at Bath. ‘Though this great Queen had made a very glorious figure in Europe by her arms and fleets abroad,’ wrote Sir John Clerk, ‘she appeared to me the most despicable mortal I had ever seen in any station.’3 Yet the time when the sad private spectacle would have fatally negated the glamour of the glorious public figure had passed.
At the battle of Oudenarde in 1708, the young Prince George of Hanover, the Queen’s distant cousin and eventual heir (the future King George II), took part. His courage in fighting on when his horse was shot under him was celebrated by Swift:
Full firmly he stood as became his high blood
Which runs in his veins so blue
For this gallant young man, being a-kin to Queen Anne,
Did as, were she a man, she would do.4
Were the Queen a man … the Warrior Queen, no longer pretending to have the heart and stomach of a king, now admits freely to her very different (female) nature. On the other hand, were the Queen a man, she would undoubtedly be a very brave one; the behaviour of her gallant young male relation epitomizes this. She might of course under certain circumstances show herself to be a great deal braver than the timorous men surrounding her. This – an aspect of the Shame Syndrome – received its most famous manifestation in the expostulation of Queen Victoria to Disraeli in 1878. ‘Oh if the Queen were a man’, she wrote furiously, ‘she would like to go and give those horrid Russians whose word one cannot trust such a beating.’5 It is a wonderful expression of unreality; but the Queen’s frustrated sentiments are not purely comic. The ageing Queen Victoria (fifty-eight to Queen Elizabeth’s fifty-four at Tilbury) has no intention of deserting her bonnet and shawl even for white plumes and silver armour. The limitations of her sex are thoroughly accepted.
Boadicea herself, in English literature, begins to float away from the historic queen of Tacitus and Dio, wronged in her situation and bloodthirsty in her behaviour, the one justifying the other: she enters some other idealized sphere of womanhood. At first her character merely underwent a subtle transformation from the appropriate Elizabethan heroine to someone representing the much lower estimate of women in Jacobean times; ‘women’s worth’, as Anne Bradstreet had it, having departed ‘with our Queen’. Fletcher’s Bonduca, first performed in about 1614, has as its centre a hero not a heroine: the British Caratach (for Caratacus, whose historic involvement was of course with Cartimandua, not Boadicea). Even the goddess Andraste emerges here as a god: Andate, who inspires the British Queen proudly to roll her ‘swarty [iniquitous] chariot wheels over the heaps of wounds and carcasses sailing through seas of blood’.6
Bonduca herself is a distinctly unheroic figure, for all her chariot wheels and her ‘armed cart’. She is for example sharply ticked off by her ally Caratach for being boastful. After her first victory, Bonduca exults: ‘A woman beat ’em … a weak woman, a woman beat these Romans!’ to which Caratach replies sardonically: ‘So it seems.’ Then he adds: ‘A man would shame to talk so.’ Throughout the play, indeed, Caratach, the trained soldier, shows more respect for the Romans – professionals like himself – than he does for Bonduca or her daughters. He will not let the Queen deride their ‘weight and worth’. As he confesses at one point: ‘I love an enemy, I was born a soldier.’
Most powerfully of all, Caratach saves some Roman soldiers from torture at the daughters’ hands, since they have been captured by treachery. It matters not to Caratach that these are the soldiers responsible for the British princesses’ brutal violation (his language will sound a sombre but not unevocative note to modern ears):
Caratach: A woman’s wisdom in our triumphs? Out, out, ye sluts, ye follies, from our swords filch our revenges basely? [To the Romans] Arm again, Gentlemen. [To the Britons] Soldiers, I charge ye help ’em.
Daughter 2: By —— Uncle, we will have vengeance for our rapes.
Caratach: By —— ye should have kept your legs closed then.
Caratach’s best advice to his nieces is to ‘Learn to spin, and curse your knotted hemp.’
Throughout the play, a Jacobean misogyny prevails. It is Fletcher’s Bonduca – unlike Spenser’s betrayed heroine – who brings about the defeat of the Britons by a military mistake. This elicits from Caratach the violent condemnation, ‘O woman, scurvie woman, beastly woman’, before the Queen in her turn is told to go home and spin. For the Romans equally, Bonduca is ‘woman, woman, unnatural woman’ when she urges her daughters to kill themselves rather than face the Roman depredation (that fate so coarsely dismissed by their uncle) a second time. Only Bonduca’s patriotic Britishness – her final refusal to plead for mercy with the noble words ‘I am unacquainted with that language’ – is still admired; her sex is scorned.
The floating away of Boadicea from this human, if despised, figure into some gauzier sphere is well illustrated by the changes which have taken place to Fletcher’s play by the time it emerges in an adaptation, with music by Henry Purcell, performed in 1695.7 Fletcher’s original is referred to in the Prologue to the printed play book as ‘so ingenious a Relick’ of time past; in this new ‘fighting age’ – that of William III’s continental campaigns against Louis XIV – it is appropriate that ‘proud Bunduca’, played here by Mrs Frances Knight, should once more tread the British stage. But proud Bonduca is a figure much chastened by the passage of a century, a period in which even the official lustful energy of women has been stripped from them in the public estimation.
Purcell’s score has been described as ranking ‘among his finest’ with the invocation ‘Divine Andate, President of War’, an exquisite tenor recitative; although Bonduca has been generally overshadowed in reputation by The Indian Queen, written about the same time.8 But the drama lacks all the violence which once made it a savage but effective piece. The language has been generally softened with Fletcher’s lusty expletives omitted. The daughters’ characters have been made tender, languishing, even sentimental, and since they no longer take rebellious action against their unpleasant fate, Caratach is no longer compelled to castigate them. As for Bunduca herself, this is the meek fashion in which she now addresses Caratach:
My Fortune wound my Female Soul too high
And lifted me above myself; but thou
Hast kindly work’d down all my Towering Thoughts …
This was an opinion – and language – more calculated to appeal to John Knox than to Queen Elizabeth I.
*
It was not that scholarly interest in the ancient Britons waned in the course of the seventeenth century: very much to the contrary. The ‘discovery’ of the North American Indians by the West Europeans led to a happy obsession with the concept of the so-called noble savage. In many cases, antiquarian accounts of the ancient Britons borrowed characteristics observed in the Indians. On her arrival in England as the wife of an Englishman, John Rolfe, in 1616 Pocahontas, daughter of the chief Powhatan, caused a sensation as a member of the Sioux tribe, who were all about six feet tall with ‘the cleanest and most exact limbs in the world’. But the ‘Nonpareil of Virginia’, as she was known, had turned gracefully into ‘the Lady Rebecca’ on her Christian baptism.9 Nor was Pocahontas in any sense a Warrior Queen; she was the biblical Ruth, not Judith, a well-treated Madam Butterfly, not a Boadicea. Originally she had twice saved the life of an Englishman, John Smith, preferring his welfare to that of her own tribe; peace not war had followed her marriage to Rolfe.
Among antiquarians destined to feel interest in the ancient Britons, another happy obsession which emerged in the seventeenth century concerning the origins of Stonehenge focused particular interest on Boadicea. As has been mentioned in Chapter Seven, Edmund Bolton in 1624 proposed Stonehenge as her missing tomb (where, according to Dio, she had been given that rich burial by her tribe). Thomas Heywood, in his Exemplary Lives of 1640, followed suit. His Boadicea, duly buried at Stonehenge – ‘that admirable monument of the stones upon Salisbury Plain’ – is illustrated in the plumes and pearls of the day, a Caroline court lady dressing up, one breast tastefully exposed in something which may have been designed to resemble the Amazon’s chiton, but certainly does not. She is also described as a ‘Mother and nurse of magnanimity’, a description which surely fits Pocahontas more closely than the first-century Queen.10
Outside history, Boadicea as a name gradually developed into a useful generic term for a heroine. It was employed for example when the making of lists of such became common in the second half of the century, figuring with severe Judith but also with peace-loving Deborah, the prophetess Hannah and the learned Abbess Hilda of Whitby; these lists themselves, generally compiled by women, being a form of protest against the prevalent denigration of their sex’s ‘worth’. To term someone a Boadicea was to make of her a heroine, but was not even necessarily to connect her to military feats. The petition of the Leveller women for the release of John Lilburne in 1649 pointed to the various ‘deliverances’ wrought by God by women’s ‘weak hands’, as Boadicea had helped the Britons to defeat the Danes (a well-meant if inaccurate historical comparison).11 A great lady such as Charlotte, Countess of Derby, who defended her castle against siege in the Civil War, might be compared to the British Queen; but so might the spirited playwright Aphra Behn, the first professional woman writer, whose fortitude was evidently in another sphere than that of the battlefield.
Historians and antiquarians similarly began to make of Boadicea more of a generic figure of patriotic intent, than a rounded female character. Aylett Sammes, in his Britannia Antiqua Illustrata of 1676, relies heavily on Tacitus for his account of ‘those insufferable Insolences’ (towards the royal women) which caused the British revolt. But he discounts the idea that Boadicea’s death could have discouraged her people, and salutes her with a laudatory verse beneath her portrait:
To War, this Queen doth with her Daughters move
She for her Wisdom, followed, they for Love …
But they being ravisht, made her understand
’Tis harder beauty to secure than Land.
Yet her example teaching them to dye,
Virtue, the room of Honour did supply.12
This ‘Thrice Happy’ Princess is as stylized, no more real than Purcell’s Bonduca. Her portrait (engraved by W. Fairthorne) shows her voluptuous rather than brawny. Here is the characteristic oval face, small curly mouth, dimpled chin and long nose of the late Stuart beauty; her long rippling hair has a tiny little crown set on top of it; the low-cut gown sets off her ‘torc’, in fact a double-stranded necklace; on her feet are a pair of elegant sandals. With her toy spear and its pretty tassel, she too is a lady in fancy dress, but with the march of time she has become a professional actress rather than a court lady: one of the stately Marshall sisters perhaps, who specialized in tragedy, playing Zempoalla, Dryden’s tempestuous Indian queen who fell in love with Montezuma.
Two courtly episodes illustrate this increasingly ‘fancy dress’ aspect of Boadicea. In 1669 the Honourable Edward Howard printed ‘An Heroick Poem’, dedicated to his aristocratic friends, including the poet Rochester, in order to elicit their comments.13 Rochester himself took advantage of this opportunity to designate the poem as ‘incomparable’ but also ‘incomprehensible’; Thomas Hobbes, on the other hand, from the library at Chats-worth, with more reason to appreciate the demands of aristocratic friendship, responded that it was a virtue in any poet ‘to advance the honour of his remote Ancestors’ while murmuring encouraging names like Homer and Virgil.
After the statutory hesitation over his heroine’s name – and finally going for Bonducaf1 – Howard launched himself into a description of a paragon of beauty and virtue. Everyone, it seems, wants to marry this peerless maid, including notably Albanius, son of King Arthur, and the British chieftain Vortiger. Bonduca herself, although courageous – ‘she dares, above her blushing Sex’s gentle fears’ – is hardly a brash Warrior Queen. For one thing her voice – that perennial test – is ‘too soft to accent the rough Laws of War’, and in any case ‘Wars’ stern horrors her soft Soul affright’. Seated as she is on a white charger, with auburn tresses ‘softer than gossamer’, in a robe embroidered with the dawn stars, surrounded by fellow virgins compared to Spring and Morning, it is hardly surprising that, after the taking of London, this Boadicea goes about the city tenderly nursing the wounded, Britons and Romans alike.
In the end Bonduca virtually dies of modesty, so far as one can make out. Since in her ‘bashful accents’ she is unable to choose between Albanius and Vortiger, they fight it out in a tournament at which both perish; Bonduca temporarily dies too or at least faints into death, until Merlin resurrects her:
The Queen’s soft life so far were fled
His Art must now recall her from the Dead.
One cannot resist observing that the bold Celtic Warrior Queen who led her armies to Colchester, to London, to St Albans and beyond, must have been turning in her grave at this amiable travesty – wherever that grave happened to be.
The Society of Roman Knights, which was formed in 1722 and lasted for three years, was the brainchild of William Stukeley, the first Secretary of the Society of Antiquaries founded in 1718.15 Stukeley was a man of an unconventional cast of mind, with a passion for Druids which finally overwhelmed his archaeological good sense – he did much valuable fieldwork at Avebury for example. Members of the Society, whose aim was to ‘search for and illustrate’ Roman monuments in Britain, took their titles from Celtic princes and other notables associated with the Roman Conquest, such as Cingetorix (Lord Winchelsea), Prasutagus and Venutius (Maurice Johnson and Roger Gale, fellow antiquaries) and Agricola (adopted by Sir John Clerk, author of that unflattering portrait of Queen Anne quoted earlier). Stukeley himself was Chyndonax, then believed to be an authentic Druid’s name.
The constitution actually allowed for members of both sexes – doubtless part of Stukeley’s scorn for the conventions, since this was two hundred years before the Society of Antiquaries admitted its first women fellows. At some point Stukeley’s wife Frances was admitted as Cartimandua, a development which, with members sticking closely to nomenclature in their frequent correspondence, led to laments like this from Cunobelinus (Samuel Gale): ‘Having been inform’d since the arrival of Prasutagus … of the never enough to be lamented Miscarriage of the incomparable Cartimandua, a Misfortune which not only myself but all Albion must be seriously touch’d with, since without doubt we have lost a second Chyndonax, or at least another Boadicea.’16
Boadicea herself was chosen by Frances Thynne, Countess of Hertford (later Duchess of Somerset). In one sense it could be argued that this wealthy and well-born patroness of writers was an admirable incarnation of the British heroine. Lady Hertford, who would have been in her twenties at the time of her induction into the society, acted as Lady of the Bedchamber to Queen Caroline both as Princess of Wales and Queen Consort. It was Lady Hertford who pleaded for Richard Savage, convicted of homicide, and secured his pardon. Other writers upon whom she looked with favour included Watts, Shenstone and James Thomson, author of ‘Rule Britannia’, who dedicated his ‘Spring’ to her and in another poem, ‘Liberty’, written later, featured Boadicea herself ‘with her raging troops’ – although once Thomson was admitted to her circle, according to naughty Horace Walpole, he took more pleasure in the aristocratic but unintellectual conversation of her husband than in her ladyship’s ‘poetical operations’.17
In another sense, the character of Frances Countess of Hertford, the philanthropic court lady and poetaster, was about as far from the patriotic and partisan Celtic Warrior Queen as it would be possible to imagine. (An equally inappropriate sobriquet was that of ‘Veleda, Archdruidess of Kew’ – a reference to Tacitus’ tower-dwelling prophetess – applied to the Dowager Princess Augusta, mother of George III, by William Stukeley in 1753, when dedicating a book about Druids to her.) The final accolade for misplaced use of the Boadicean myth must however be reserved for William Cowper in his eponymous ode of 1780.18
Cowper’s ‘Boadicea’ begins, apparently, in fine historical fettle:
When the British warrior queen,
Bleeding from the Roman rods
Sought with an indignant mien
Counsel of her country’s Gods
Sage beneath a spreading oak
Sat the Druid, hoary chief,
Every burning word he spoke
Full of rage and full of grief.
Here is a picture both plausible and poetic, without too much licence, one feels, in its details. It is only when one realizes that Cowper, no friend to the American patriots currently engaged in the War of Independence, is actually casting the Americans as the Romans, that the full extent of the transference emerges. For Cowper devoutly hoped for the triumph of the British forces. And he uses the story of Boadicea as a test on which to hang the British right to empire; Boadicea herself may be defeated but the future belongs to Britain – not the Romans (or the Americans).
Regions Caesar never knew
Thy posterity shall sway
Where his eagles never flew
None invincible as they.
The ode ends:
Ruffians! pitiless as proud
Heaven awards the vengeance due;
Empire is on us bestow’d
Shame and ruin wait for you.
For Boadicea, the British Warrior Queen who attempted to throw off the Roman yoke, to be regarded as a symbol of Britain’s inalienable right to its own imperialism – towards America – is indeed an audacious use of patriotic legend.
About the time Christina of Sweden was formally granted power as ‘king’ – only to surrender it voluntarily a few years later – another genuine Warrior Queen was giving the Portuguese in Angola good reason to regret the persistent tradition of African female leadership in war. An eccentric, intellectually inclined female, a woefully insipid princess as Boadicea had become in certain literary works: these would certainly have provided riper targets for the seventeenth-century Portuguese. Instead they faced Jinga Mbandi. This at least was her tribal name, but since the rich variety of its spellings approaches that of Boadicea, including Nzinga, Singa and Zhinga, she will here be described by the name invariably used by the Portuguese then, and dignified by widespread popular usage in the People’s Republic of Angola today: Queen Jinga.19
Unlike Queen Elizabeth I, for example, with her private pacifism and her artificial creation of a Warrior Queen persona, Queen Jinga followed in the bold tradition of Boadicea as she actually was (so far as we can tell about the British leader). That is, the Angolan Queen, described by a European with much truth as ‘a Cunning Virago’, led her people in war against the forces of an alien would-be occupying power, failing in the end to throw off their yoke. As a result, there is another parallel with Boadicea. Jinga’s story, too, has survived down the centuries in its own emolliated form, to make her a patriotic heroine in her country today.
The Queen as a symbol of national resistance is of course a category into which female rulers can fall without necessarily displaying the sheer belligerence of a Boadicea or a Jinga. As we shall see, both Maria Theresa and Catherine the Great shared Elizabeth I’s prudent love of peace not war; a preference which in Europe and its environs was fast becoming the hallmark of an intelligent female leader, and, one might argue, has remained so ever since. On the other hand, there is always a special niche for the Boadicean type of Warrior Queen in her country’s pantheon, which does at least suggest a lingering connection in the popular consciousness to the ancient goddesses of war.
Within the confines of this book, the nineteenth-century Rani of Jhansi will also be found to come into that category: but examples are found in many different civilizations throughout the world and straddle history. In AD 39, twenty-odd years before Boadicea led her own uprising, two Vietnamese sisters, Trung Trac and Trung Nhi, led the first rising in their country against the domination of the Chinese.20 The parallels between the story of Trung Trac and that of Boadicea are even more exact than those of Queen Jinga; Trung Trac was a lady of title, the widow of a man murdered by the Chinese, and she herself was raped by them. Together with her sister, she mustered an army of vassals to avenge her husband’s death. Hers was not the only female heroism attached to her cause: of Trung Trac’s supporters, Phung Thi Chinh, who was heavily pregnant, did not hesitate to plunge into the middle of the fray and, when she actually gave birth, paused merely to strap her baby on her back before hacking her way out. The kingdom of the battling Trungs, extending south to Hué and north to southern China, lasted only three years: finally defeated by the Chinese, the sisters flung themselves into a river and drowned.
Like the Trungs, Trieu Au in the third century has survived in Vietnamese myth as a female war leader who stood out against Chinese oppression. Trieu Au’s story is the stuff of Western fairy tales as well as Vietnamese myth: an orphan who was cruelly treated by her brother and sister-in-law, she killed the latter and escaped to the mountains. A virgin warrior (she is sometimes known as the ‘Vietnamese Joan of Arc’), she raised a thousand troops to liberate her country from the Chinese in 248. When her brother tried to remonstrate with her, Trieu Au answered him boldly in words which have become enshrined at the heart of her legend: ‘I want to rail against wind and tide, kill the whales in the ocean, sweep the whole country to save people from slavery, and I have no desire to take abuse.’ Trieu Au’s story too ended in defeat and suicide: but the Vietnamese prints which show her in her golden armour, a sword in either hand, riding upon an elephant, give a better impression of the undying quality of her reputation as a patriotic Vietnamese heroine (a reputation only enhanced in Vietnam today where she is regarded as an early resister against Vietnam’s modern enemy: China).
It is the oppression of an imperialist power – the Romans, Portuguese, British and Chinese respectively – which not only links the fortunes of Boadicea, Jinga, the Rani of Jhansi and the Vietnamese heroines, but is also half responsible for their immortality. The other essential element is of course the subsequent resurgence of the defeated people in question, without which their heroines’ martial reputations might have perished with them. (A street in Luanda was named after Queen Jinga immediately after Angolan independence.) Cowper’s ode was written to justify Britain against America – ‘empire is on us bestow’d’ – in an age when a queen no longer needed to be overtly militaristic, and Boadicea had become a mere waxwork figure of generalized patriotism. Yet ironically its lines could have been taken as rallying cries for these other far more genuine ‘Boadiceas’.
Jinga Mbandi was born in the 1580s and lived until 1663, an extraordinary span for any human being at that time. But then Queen Jinga was extraordinary, the mere facts of her career, ungarnished by propaganda, causing wonder. As in the case of Queen Tamara of Georgia, the swirling legends of creation which wreathed so many African societies were not inimical to the idea of a powerful, even all-powerful, woman. These legends included a tradition of female semi-deities, such as the two mighty queens of the Mpororo of central East Africa, priestesses to their people, carried round in baskets by their ministers. In the Hausa lands of northern Nigeria (where creation was said to have begun with a woman going out and founding a kingdom), a queen known as Amina ruled in Katsina in the first half of the fifteenth century; south of Zaria, a woman, Bazao-Turunku, led another warrior tribe. There were feats of arms by the women of the Nilotic Lango.21
Nor did this tradition die away with Jinga’s own death. Livingstone and Stanley encountered independent queens ruling the Fanti in Ghani; the ‘King’s Amazons’ of Dahomey were not so much notorious in the eyes of their opponents as celebrated. During the course of King Gueso’s disastrous war against Abeokuta, they stood their ground while the men fled, or, as Captain Duncan of the Life Guards expressed it, ‘On a campaign I would prefer the women of that country, as soldiers, to the men.’ Sarraounia, a recent film directed by Med Hondo of Mauritius from a novel by Aboulaye Mamani of Niger, was based on real events that occurred in Central Africa at the end of the nineteenth century. It tells the story of an African queen, half-warrior, half-sorceress, who leads her people to victory against the oppressive French colonial power in true Boadicean style, a towering figure of matriarchal strength as she shakes her spear and invokes the tribal gods before battle. Nor have such manifestations died away in the present century: popular uprisings in Uganda in 1987 were headed by a woman, Alice Lakwena, a self-styled high priestess of magic who inspired her Holy Spirit Movement to battle.22
Jinga herself operated in central West Africa, where the two principal kingdoms were those of Kongo and Ndongo. She was probably the daughter of the King – the Ngola – of Ndongo, with a mother from a vassal tribe. Until a few years before Jinga’s birth, the Portuguese presence in Ndongo had consisted of friendly missionaries; but its geographical situation made it an ideal base for the growing Portuguese slave trade. With that in mind, Luanda was founded in 1576, and given its first Portuguese governor. It is from the century of conflict which followed – ending in the Portuguese victory – that Jinga’s name has emerged as a heroic national figure.
We first hear of her, however, as an official negotiator with the Portuguese on behalf of her brother, the new Ngola, in the early 1620s. By the beginning of the seventeenth century, the slave markets based in Angola were rapidly expanding: an enthusiastic official wrote that the huge interior population would provide slaves enough ‘until the end of the world’.23 Ten thousand of them annually were already being exported from Luanda. It was a trade from which the African chiefs (like the Arabs) did not flinch when it suited their local purposes. Their selling members of rival or hostile tribes for a good price was one part of the process which enabled the Portuguese to build up such a gargantuan and horrifying trade, in order to satisfy the greedy labour demands of the Brazilian plantations and mines. But the Africans wanted co-operation to be on their own terms: and they also naturally wished to preserve their independence. Thus the aggressive new Portuguese Governor of Luanda – João Mendes de Vasconcelos – had exiled the Ngola of Ndongo to the Kwanza Islands.
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 Sá 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 careerf2. ‘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 grounds 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 grounds: ‘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.
1 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 Boadicea 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
2 These quotations (originally in Portuguese) are taken from a fourth-form history textbook in use in an elementary school in Luanda in 1987.