Free Princesses Behaving Badly by Linda Rodriguez McRobbie

also claimed that she
was
Imbangala. (It’s unlikely that she was ever initiated formally into the tribe, a gruesome ritual that involvedthe murder of a child.) Two decades later, she symbolically attempted to distance herself from their bloody rites by reconverting to Christianity, which had the added benefit of allowing her to call on the Portuguese to support her plans for hereditary succession.
W OMAN K ING
    With Njinga’s tenuous grasp on the throne as the backdrop, some of her stranger actions as ruler make more sense—especially what she did to cast herself as the
king
of the Mbundu-speaking people. For one thing, she took several husbands at a time, as many as 50 or 60, and called them “concubines.” They were forced to wear women’s clothing and sleep in the same room as her ladies-in-waiting, though if they touched the women with any sexual intent, they were immediately executed. This unusual situation likely engendered the Marquis de Sade’s claim that Njinga immolated her lovers after spending one night with them, a practice that seems spectacularly wasteful.
    Though she probably didn’t burn her lovers alive, Njinga’s genderbending habits asserted her identity as king, as did her martial prowess. She led her troops skillfully in battle and had her ladies-in-waiting equipped and trained as soldiers to serve as her personal bodyguards. It’s even alleged that she cut off a man’s head in a ritual sacrifice and drank his blood directly from his neck. Given how long she ruled, her efforts to cast herself as king seem to have worked.
    But eventually, Njinga was forced by the Portuguese and internal factions arrayed against her to decamp to the highlands; her Ndongo lands were given over to a puppet king in service to the foreign powers. Her retreat was a strategic one, however, offering more freedom to engage the Portuguese in the kind of battle her warriors could win: guerilla warfare.
    Njinga also took territory as far as 500 miles inland, using war captives to fuel her slave trade. Within a few years, she conquered the kingdom of Matamba and made it her base, turning it into one of the most important and wealthiest states in Central Africa. By 1640, she was the region’s most powerful African king. She ruled much of the land formerly belonging to the Ngola puppet king and controlled a commercial slave trade circuitthat sold upward of 13,000 enslaved Africans a year.
    But in 1650, after nearly 25 years of warfare, Njinga again found it politically palatable to make friends with the Portuguese. Her Dutch allies, who’d long supported her efforts to harass the Portuguese, had left the region in 1648; not only that, Njinga was getting older and had begun worrying about who would take over after she was gone. An alliance with her old friends/foes promised some measure of security. So she reconverted to Christianity, introduced Portuguese missionaries and ambassadors into her court, adopted European dress, and reestablished trade with the Portuguese slavers. All was made official in a peace treaty in 1656.
    Njinga died in 1663, at age 82; her death prompted a struggle for succession that led to the disintegration of the Ndongo-Matamba kingdom. She had held it together by sheer force of will, and no one else could do that. In the 350 years since her death, Njinga has been rehabilitated into the heroine of colonial resistance who rejected the yoke of foreign rule. She was never more important as a symbol than during Angola’s struggle for freedom in the twentieth century, which culminated in independence in 1975. Although the details of her mythology aren’t exactly accurate, there’s one point her legend does get right: Njinga was a warrior who forced the colonials to deal with her as an equal.



Justa Grata Honoria
T HE P RINCESS W HO N EARLY W RECKED THE R OMAN E MPIRE
    C A . 417–452
T HE R OMAN E MPIRE
    W hen Roman princess Justa Grata Honoria found herself about to be packed off to some backwater