Editing Nzinga of Ndongo and Matamba (section)

=== Final years ===
After the wars with Portugal ended, Nzingha attempted to rebuild her kingdom. As noted by Linda Heywood, Nzingha's final years were spent establishing a unified kingdom she could pass on to her sister. However, her native Ndongo had been ravaged by decades of war, with wide swathes of the land left depopulated; as such, Nzingha focused her efforts on strengthening Matamba.<ref name=":30" /> She developed Matamba as a trading power by capitalizing on its strategic position as the gateway to the Central African interior, strengthening her hold on the slave trade.<ref name=":3" /> She resettled former slaves on new land and allowed women in her war camp to bear children, which had been banned under the wartime Imbangala customs.<ref name="nyt-elliott-hughes-2019" /> She also reformed the legal code of her kingdom and established contact with Christian rulers in Europe, hoping to certify Matamba's status as an internationally recognized Christian kingdom.<ref name=":30" />

Peace caused major changes at Nzingha's royal court. Whereas in wartime she had adopted the masculine dress and mannerisms of an Imbangala warlord, in the postwar era Nzingha's court became more feminine; she adopted new fashions in court, imported silk and goods from Europe, placed renewed focus on education (replacing military drills) and abolished concubinage, eventually marrying her favorite concubine in a Christian ceremony.<ref name=":30" /> Nzingha – wary of a potential succession crisis – also worked to increase the power of the royal family in Ndongo. She distanced herself from the Imbangalan culture and abolished many of the democratic and meritocratic policies she had tolerated in wartime, seeing them as a threat to the monarchy.<ref name=":32" /> During her later reign, divides opened in her court between educated Christian converts who supported her royalist policies and traditionalist Imbangalans and Mbundus, who supported a return to the more militaristic, meritocratic policies of the past.<ref name=":33">Heywood (2017) p. 224, 225, 232, 234</ref><ref name=":1">Thornton (1991) pp. 1–33</ref>