NDONGO

historical African kingdom of Mbundu people that extended inland from Luanda, Angola. It was bounded by the Dande River to the north, the Lucala River to the east, the Kwanza River to the south, and the Atlantic Ocean to the west. Ndongo's ruler, the ngola, originally recognized the overlordship of the Kongo kingdom in the early 16th century. By the 1540s Ndongo enjoyed trade relations with the Portuguese slave traders of So Tom, who established a settlement at Luanda. When Kongo tried to stop this infringement of its monopoly of Portuguese trade in the area, Ndongo routed Kongo's forces at Caxito on the Dande River in 1556 and achieved complete independence from its former overlord. Hoping to profit from relations with Portugal, the ngola invited Portuguese emissaries to Ndongo. A group of Jesuits arrived, accompanied by the nobleman Paulo Dias de Novais. After being forcibly detained in Ndongo for several years, Dias returned to Portugal and then obtained from the king, in 1571, authorization to conquer and Christianize Angola, the kingdom of the ngola. Dias landed with his army in 1575 at Luanda, where he built a fort. In 1579 he began to advance up the Kwanza toward Kabasa, the Ndongo capital. Ndongo resisted with prolonged guerrilla warfare. In the decades that followed, thousands were killed on each side. The Portuguese secured a 70-mile (113-km) strip of land up the Kwanza to the mouth of the Lucala, where they built a fort at Massangano in 1583. It served as a base for the Portuguese capture of slaves for use in Brazil. A peace treaty was negotiated in 1623 between the greatly reduced Ndongorepresented by the ngola's sister, Ana de Sousa Njinga (Njinga also spelled Nzinga or Ginga)and Portuguese Angola. The next year Njinga succeeded to the throne and protested Portuguese violations of the treaty. She harboured fugitive slaves from Angola, welcomed into her army Portuguese-trained African soldiers, and encouraged Africans under Portuguese rule to rebel. Her stronghold was captured in 1626, and a Portuguese puppet replaced her on the Ndongo throne. Njinga escaped to the kingdom of Matamba, conquered it, and continued to harass Portuguese Angola until 1656, when a new peace treaty was signed. In the 1660s the puppet king of Ndongo rebelled against Portuguese hegemony. Angola, reinforced with troops from Brazil, defeated him in 1671, whereupon all Ndongo territory was incorporated into Angola.