She fought Portugal for 40 years and they never once defeated her
That is the story of Queen Nzinga Mbande of Ndongo and Matamba, in what is now Angola.
The Portuguese governor once invited her to negotiate and set out only one chair, for himself, so she would have to stand before him like a servant. She refused to stand. She had one of her own attendants kneel down, sat on his back, and looked the governor in the eye as an equal.
She became queen after her brother the king died, taking a title normally kept for men. At the time the Portuguese were shipping tens of thousands of her people across the sea into slavery in Brazil. Her own family had made deals with them. She chose to fight instead.
When Ndongo was betrayed and overrun, she moved east and seized the kingdom of Matamba. She made it a refuge. Runaway slaves fled to her and she took them in. African soldiers trained by the Portuguese defected to her side. She built them into an army. She allied with the Dutch to fight Portugal from two directions.
They never captured her. They never broke her. She died on her own throne in 1663, around eighty years old, ruling a free and powerful state that the Portuguese had to treat as an equal.
And the kingdom she built as a shelter for the enslaved outlived her by more than two hundred years.
They gave her a room with one chair to make her feel small. She turned it into one of the greatest legends Africa ever produced.
#HistoricalAfrica #Que