Nzinga: She Who Did Not Kneel
By Márcia Batista Ramos
We are not what we were, but what we choose to remember. I learned that from her—the one who always refused to bow her head. I was but a child when her name began to drift through the air like an ancient drum: Nzinga Mbande, the Ginga Queen. Her name was Nzinga Mbande, but the Portuguese called her “Rainha Zinga”—the slavers feared her, and with a whisper distorted by time, they called her “Queen Ginga.”
Years later, already free, old, and with bones like wooden knots, I read a manuscript hidden in an abandoned monastery. A report by a defeated Portuguese captain. It did not say her name. It didn’t have to. His was the voice of those who, while subjugating, believed they brought order only to find disobedience in the form of a woman, beneath an African sun that showed no mercy to the mornings and fell heavily upon the red earth, as if the entire sky wished to incinerate memory.
This is the testimony of both: mine and hers. For history is not told with a single mouth.
I. The Slave
They called me “Bamba.” In Kimbundu, the tongue of my grandmothers, that meant “smoke,” because in those days, smoke was the only thing war left behind: smoke, ashes, and ghosts. I was thirteen when the Bangalas—allies of the Portuguese—surrounded our village. My village was sold with all its people; we were traded for two muskets and a barrel of rum by the enemies who besieged us and handed us over to the Portuguese.
I walked bound to other children toward Luanda, where the sun cast no shadow. Upon arrival, a soldier branded my thigh with a red-hot cross, a mark that burned hotter than the sun. To this day, the pain I felt in that moment stays with me—a pain that pierced through flesh, nerves, blood, and bone, settling in my soul like the weight of another world, like a tightening in my chest.
In the market square, in front of the São Miguel fortress, they paraded us like cattle. They kept us humiliated, amidst the pain and sorrow of our captive people, when suddenly the shouts of other enslaved groups were heard: she has arrived, they said. She came from the hill where the palms swayed, a woman seated upon a wooden throne carved with ancient symbols. She wore red, the color of war and power.
She wore necklaces of millenary beads and bracelets heavy with history. Her eyes were like knives that required no edge.
It was breathtaking to see her imposing figure. Her soldiers did not shout, for silence itself parted at her passing. Tall, brawny men carried the throne upon which she sat. It was clear she was born to rule in a world where a woman was expected to lift neither her voice nor her gaze. Yet, since childhood, Nzinga spoke like men and fought like the gods. Her father, Ngola Kiluanji, saw in her an ancestral spirit, and the elders of her village prophesied before her birth that she came to face the dizzying changes of her world. For Nzinga Mbande shall be more than a queen. She shall be the walking earth, the old ones predicted as they touched the future.
Her royalty was evident in her presence, her posture, and a certain je ne sais quoi that transcended her soul. Later, I learned she was a great military and political strategist, a diplomat, and a warrior.
Still, I was struck by the first sight of her dressed in red fabrics, necklaces dripping with history, her forehead held high like the mountains where rivers are born. No one dared speak to her or look her directly in the eye. Everyone knew that in the land of Ndongo, she was Ngola—the ancestral title of Ndongo. She was a living myth, a walking decree.
In truth, she was more than a queen: she was myth, law, and retribution.
II. The Captain
He wrote: “when I received her as an emissary of Ndongo. I expected a plea. I found a danger.” “She defends freedom as an inalienable right and condemns the territorial and human dominion of the Europeans.”
He said her presence filled the room like the smoke of an invisible fire. That she spoke Portuguese better than many knights of the Court. That she turned the audience into an inversion of power. He saw her turn a servant into her throne. He saw her sign a treaty without bowing her head. He heard her voice, soft yet implacable: —“I did not come to beg. I came to warn.”
And though they baptized her as Ana de Sousa, he knew it was a mask. “She took us for fools. While we pretended to evangelize her, she was organizing armies in the jungles.”
He, who possessed cannons, lost to her knives in the night. And even in defeat, he respected her: “Nzinga was a queen of absolute will. More than that: she was Africa in human form.”
III. The Freedwoman
Many years after being sold in the square by the Portuguese, I became free by accident. An epidemic killed my masters. I escaped among the bodies and walked north, toward Matamba. I sought the Kingdom of Nzinga Mbande, for since childhood I dreamed of being near her, even if only in her service.
When I arrived, I found her in her fortress. She did not recognize me. But I recognized her: she was the same. Older, yet still firm. Her soldiers greeted her with spears crossed over their chests. Women kissed her knees. Her enemies said she was a witch. But I knew she was only feared because she would not surrender.
To me, she gave another name. She called me Kiafika, which in our language means “she who returns.”
It was not easy to serve her. There were days when she spoke with the ancestors, days when she ordered the execution of traitors, and nights when she remained alone, writing letters in Portuguese and Latin, using ink made of sap and ash. She did not sleep much. She trusted almost no one. But she always looked at me with tenderness.
Once, I asked her if she was not afraid. She laughed. She stroked my head like a mother. —“Fear belongs to those who accept chains. I was born to break them.”
I saw her negotiate with bearded men dressed in gold. She forced them to kneel. She spoke to them in Portuguese better than they did. She offered them her hand, but never her soul.
I stayed there; I wove for her, I listened to her plans. I saw how she dealt with the Dutch, with Jesuits, with treacherous kings. I saw how she grew old, but never retreated.
IV. The Captain (Final Testimony)
“She died in 1663,” he wrote. “Not by iron nor by treason, but by time. Yet when she closed her eyes, all of Angola trembled.” And he added, as one writing a warning for the future: “No empire is safe as long as women like her exist.”
V. I
I still dream of her. Sometimes I wake to the echo of her footsteps on the dry earth. Sometimes, in dreams, I believe I am her when I refuse something, when I walk upright, when I do not accept an imposition as destiny.
Other times, I want to understand what Nzinga was in all her greatness, and I say: Nzinga was queen, she was sister, she was spear, she was diplomacy. Nzinga did not need a crown. Her voice was a decree. Her body was territory. Her story was a river that no one could contain. In the end, I believe she was both name and symbol.
And I, the smoke-girl, now a woman risen who one day returned, I write so they do not bury her twice. Even knowing that Nzinga is destined to remain alive in the prayers to the Gods who crossed the Atlantic in slave ships during the forced diaspora. Yes, she will live in the songs of women who deny the yoke. In the dances that celebrate victory over oblivion. In every drum that sounds when someone tries to chain history.
Nzinga was not a queen. She was an empire. And there will never be gunpowder, cross, or decree that can bury her.
