#queen nzinga

These Questions are the result of suggestions a the previous iteration.This category may include suggestions made too late to fall into the correct earlier time grouping. In some cases a culture lasted a really long time and I grouped them by whether it was likely the later or earlier grouping made the most sense with the information I had. (Invention ofs tend to fall in an earlier grouping if it's still open. Ones that imply height of or just before something tend to get grouped later, but not always. Sometimes I'll split two different things from the same culture into different polls because they involve separate research goals or the like).

“She was a West African ruler who served as queen of the Ambundu Kingdoms of Ndongo and Matamba, located in present day northern Angola. She received military and political training as a child and demonstrated an aptitude for defusing political crises as an ambassador to the Portuguese Empire. She later assumed power over Ndongo after the deaths of her father and brother and would go onto conquer Matamba. She ruled during a period of rapid growth in the African slave trade and enroachment of the Portuguese Empire into South West Africa, in attempts to control the slave trade. She fought for independence and stature of her kingdoms in a reign that lasted 37 years.”

Ending today with descriptions of two cases of notable resistance to the trade within Africa, as a reminder that evil things have always been resisted, at all points. The first is Queen Nzinga, who would IMO have been a better choice for The Woman King than the Dahomey Amazons were the goal one of truthfulness versus telling a good story.

She really did what the people in the movie were presented as doing, and did it with enough skill to evict the Portuguese and their bid for an empire in this region entirely. The reality, as the lesson of Yad Vashem should teach in another context, is that evil is not inevitable, or an inevitability. It is deliberate multi-faceted interlocking choices.

People could and did make different choices, as Queen Nzinga did, and there can at times be a veil of silence over that, to allow the evils that were done in the past to exist sans challenge, because that allows for the comforting notion that these evils were just 'things that happened.'