Staying on her home continent is the key to success with Nzinga Mbande.

Nzinga Mbande’s Kongo wants to be the preeminent power on her home continent. Her additional yields on her home combined with the Nkisi ability set her up well for a Culture Victory. The Ngao Mbeba helps her conquer any civilization that enters her home continent. The Mbanza will help her cities grow large and prosperous.

An important figure in the Angolan independence movement and in the early history of colonialism in Africa, Nzinga Mbande struggled to establish a voice for herself (and a kingdom to rule), bouncing between various kingdoms and playing the European powers off of each other as she did so.

The Portuguese reached Kongo in the 1480s. What they found there was the Kingdom of Kongo, an elective monarchy that had been in power since the 1300s. Missionaries had established schools and developed a syncretic religious practice in Kongo and, within a decade, had baptized the king. Slavery was a more complicated matter. The Kongolese had long practiced slavery, bringing subjects into the capital from wars and raids and forcing them to settle and work. When the Portuguese established their plantations on Sao Tome, Kongo made an exclusive trade agreement to supply the island with captives for enslaved labor. Over time, Kongo and Portugal forged an uneasy alliance.

The problem was that the Portuguese did not respect Kongo’s monopoly on the slave trade, and Afonso – Mvemba a Nzinga - urged the deal’s end. It should be noted that Mvemba was not advocating an end to slavery or protesting imperial aggression but merely that the Portuguese did not adhere to the terms of their agreement. This issue leads Portugal to set up camps in neighboring kingdoms, both as trading camps as well as raiding camps.

A generation later, areas on Kongo’s frontier that were once targeted by slavers were now potential partners. Ndongo was one of these. In 1590, it was in a state of war against the Portuguese and their Kongolese allies, as well as suffering attacks from a particularly fierce band of mercenaries known as the Imbangala. As this war started going poorly, a noble staged a coup d’etat, ousting many members of the royal court, including Nzinga, who flees to the nearby kingdom of Matamba. But the new leader of Ndongo found a need for her political acumen and connections, and drafted her to negotiate with the Portuguese.

Here is where Nzinga shone. She deliberately defied Portuguese norms. Refusing to take the allotted submissive role in negotiations, she dressed in local finery, presenting herself as a queen, not a subject. When the Portuguese sought to have her sit on the ground, she had her attendant become her chair. She held out on the subject of baptism, using it as an offer in negotiations. In the end, she arrived at a peace.

But this peace didn’t last. The Imbangala desired more territory and acted in defiance of both the Portuguese and Ndongo, keeping up the war. As the crisis deepened at home, the king of Ndongo died, and Nzinga, with her wide-ranging net of political and strategic allies, sought control. The Portuguese, remembering her fire, balked at recognizing her and demanded that she pay obeisance to their own selection of a puppet-king. She refused and escaped to join the rebels – those same Imbangala. She married into that group and rebuilt her forces after the highly militaristic fashion of her new people. With this, she swept over the area, taking Matamba for her own, though not all of Ndongo. From this vantage point, she established independent relations with Dutch traders, with whom she exchanged slaves as a financial lifeline into resistance, and built an alliance with the Dutch and Kongolese against the Portuguese.

War dragged on. The Dutch were forced out by the Portuguese, but at the same time, Portugal entered into a war with Spain. In 1656, after years of fighting, the two foes agreed on a peace treaty – Portugal gained a good deal of the coast, while Nzinga gained her monopoly over the slave trade. It was many years until the Europeans again sought to breach the interior.

She is remembered now as a force against the Portuguese, especially in depictions of the Angolan Civil War.