The Queen Who Made Her Own Chair

In 1622, the Portuguese governor of Luanda summoned a representative from the Kingdom of Ndongo to discuss a peace treaty. King Ngola Mbande sent his sister, Nzinga. She arrived in traditional royal dress, spoke fluent Portuguese, and immediately noticed that the governor had provided himself a chair and offered her a mat on the floor.

She signaled to one of her attendants, who dropped to all fours. Nzinga sat on their back, met the governor at eye level, and negotiated the treaty from there.

When the meeting ended and the governor gestured toward the still-kneeling attendant, Nzinga reportedly said it was beneath her to use the same chair twice. Then she went home and built an army.

For the next thirty years she waged guerrilla war against Portugal, personally leading troops into battle in her sixties. She forged an alliance with the Dutch, defeated a Portuguese army in 1647, and by 1656 forced Portugal to recognize her as sovereign ruler of both Ndongo and Matamba. At a military review in 1662, a priest watched the seventy-nine-year-old queen perform agility drills for her soldiers. She died peacefully the following year, at roughly eighty.

In the century after her death, queens ruled Matamba for at least eighty of those hundred and four years. The chair they refused to give her changed every year after.