Warrior Queens: Boadicea's Chariot (42 page)

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 career
^f2
. ‘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.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Queen versus Monster

Let us fight the Monster, let us beat the Monster down

QUEEN LOUISE OF PRUSSIA
on Napoleon

A woman with a pretty face, but little intelligence and quite incapable of foreseeing the consequences of what she does

NAPOLEON
on Queen Louise of Prussia

B
utterflies are not associated with battlefields (although they may actually be found there, fluttering incongruously amid the trampled corn and wildflowers of a long hot bloodstained summer’s day). Napoleon Bonaparte thought that women did not belong there either: he had a profound dislike of anything approaching the Amazon in womankind, and theoretically even intriguing women met with his censure. As he assured his first wife Josephine, he liked women to be ‘
bonnes, douces et conciliantes
’ and on another occasion ‘
bonnes, naïves et douces
’; adding, with more tact than accuracy, that that was because such good, sweet, naïve, soothing women resembled her.
¹

The object of Napoleon’s disapproval was Queen Louise of Prussia. Ironically enough, she was by nature quite as gentle and submissive as the most exigent male could require, as well as being as lovely a princess as ever won the heart of a king. It was cruel destiny – a destiny incarnated by Napoleon himself – which transformed this harmless and iridescent creature into a Warrior Queen ‘dressed as an Amazon’ as Napoleon terms her in 1806, in the uniform of her regiment of dragoons: writing twenty incendiary letters every day, ‘an Armida in her madness destroying her own palace with fire’. The reference was to Gluck’s opera
Armide
, popular with both French and Prussian audiences: it was in fact performed in Berlin for Louise’s own wedding day. The eponymous heroine was a princess of Damascus at the time of the First Crusade, founded on Tasso’s ‘wily witch’ in
Jerusalem Delivered
who, foiled by her lover, ended by calling on demons: ‘destroy this palace!’
²

Queen Louise’s tragedy, in one sense, lay in the fact that she found herself matched against a man whom the Queen and her circle were inclined to sum up in one simple expression of horror as the ‘Monster’. This was of course too simple a judgement: the real threat was not so much in Napoleon’s perceived monstrosity of nature as in the brilliance of his military talent. Even one of Louise’s staunchest confidantes ruefully admitted that war was Napoleon’s trade: ‘he understands it and we do not’.
³

But there was another deeper layer to Louise’s tragedy, which made of her a genuine martyr to her people’s own zeal at the time, as well as a patriotic heroine and martyr to the generations which followed. If Napoleon was indeed a monster, then it was optimistic at best to match the frail Queen Louise against him. Why did the fact that she emerged crushed from the encounter, failing to save Prussia from his depredations, generate surprise as well as despair? This was a development which must always have been expected along the level of common sense. The answer lies in the false but exciting expectations sometimes aroused in the human breast by the sight of one type of Warrior Queen: ‘sainted’ and ‘possessed of angelic goodness’ – descriptions freely applied to Queen Louise – this Holy Figurehead of the Prussian armies must surely bless her people with victory over the forces of evil.