Kingdom of Ndongo

The Kingdom of Ndongo, also called Angola or Dongo, was an early modern state of the Kimbundu-speaking Mbundu people in the highlands between the Lukala and Kwanza rivers, in what is now northern Angola. Its ruler bore the title Ngola, from which the Portuguese name of the colony derived. Ndongo was first recorded in the sixteenth century as a vassal of Kongo, though it was the most powerful of those states; in 1518 its king Ngola Kiluanji sent ambassadors to Portugal asking for Catholic priests, and a mission reached the kingdom in 1520. The king ruled from a capital called Kabasa, near modern N'dalatando, with a court, the o-mbala, and a hierarchy of sobas, or territorial nobles, who paid tribute and fought for him. Portuguese slaving and the advance of the colony of Angola from Luanda led to decades of war from the 1570s. In 1617 Governor Luis Mendes de Vasconcelos invaded with Imbangala allies, sacked the capital and drove the Ngola to the islands of the Kwanza. Nzinga Mbandi, who negotiated with the Portuguese in 1621 and later ruled as queen, made Ndongo and Matamba a centre of resistance for four decades. The kingdom lost its independence when the fortress of Pungo a Ndongo fell in 1671.