Mapping Sovereignty: Njinga, Missionary Writing and the Ambivalences of African Legibility

Abstract

The article examines Giovanni Antonio Cavazzi da Montecuccolo’s Istorica descrizione de’ tre regni Congo, Matamba et Angola (1687) as a key text in the seventeenth-century Catholic effort to render West Central Africa legible within a Christian epistemological framework. Produced under the auspices of Propaganda Fide, Cavazzi’s chronicle translates African political sovereignty – most notably that of Queen Njinga of Matamba – into a moralized narrative of sin, conversion, and redemption. Drawing on Cavazzi’s firsthand experience as Njinga’s confessor, as well as the visual regime established by Paolo da Lorena’s engravings, the article shows how admiration and censure coexist within missionary representation. Rather than dismissing such accounts as purely didactic or exploitative, the present essay situates them within a broader historiographical dialogue that includes the more empathetic portrayals of Antonio da Gaeta and Francesco Maria Gioia, as well as modern historical reconstructions by John Thornton and Linda Heywood. Mobilizing theoretical frameworks from Michel de Certeau, Henri Lefebvre, Martin Jay, and Robyn Wiegman, the article analyzes how space, vision, and racialized visibility structure missionary knowledge. It argues that Capuchin texts functioned simultaneously as ethnographic records and performative scripts that sought to regulate bodies and territories, yet inadvertently opened sites of negotiation and resistance.