Learning about a Woman Queen in Africa: Njinga (1583-1663) as an Ecological Human Rights Defender and a Sister Against Turbulent Times of Racism and War: An Ecolinguistic Study

Abstract

Njinga (1582 Ndongo-December 1663 Matamba) was a female black warrior from the Ndongo and Matamba Kingdoms of the Mbundu people known as Angola today where Portuguese is the official language of communication. She was criticized for assisting the Portuguese, being a cannibal, and contributing to the African slave trade. She could speak several languages. She was the daughter of King Kiluanji. However, according to a movie on her, she freed her country from Portuguese invaders during the turbulent times of war and racism, leading to slavery (see Graciano (director of the movie), 2013). In this study, her representations as a good strategist and a politician in the movie directed by Graciano (2013) and in the comics on her prepared and published by UNESCO (comic strip text by Serbin and Joubeaud, 2014) will be compared from an ecocritical point of view as slavery and mining are also means of nature devastation, leading to turbulent times of pandemics, discrimination, and wars. Arran Stibbe’s (2015 and 2021) ecological discourse analysis strategies will be used to divide sentences on Njinga’s acts into three categories as those related to (1) destructive discourse, (2) ambivalent discourse, and (3) beneficial discourse in relation to environmental ethics, keeping in mind the Halliday’s (1994) three language “metafunctions” categorized as (a) “ideational,” (d) “interpersonal,” and (c) “textual” (as cited in Gong and Liu, 2018).