Subject: Mozingo
Date: Sat, 24 Apr 2004 10:15:39 -0400
From: Yvonne Kendley
Organization: QuesTours International Inc.

Hi cousins - This is the answer from Ms. Heywood. She believes that the spelling of Mozingo is native to the Kongo and may not have been changed at all when Edward arrived in VA. I interpret what she writes below as Mozingo being a native African name OR one that could have been changed to that spelling upon the arrival of the Portuguese. Hope you all find this as interesting as I do. Yvonne


Dear Ms Kendley,
Thanks for your message. In our understanding the name "Mozingo" in seventeenth century sources relates to the Kikongo name which is now written as "Nzinga", but in documents from Kongo at that time was usually written exactly as you still spell it. It is a common name, borne by kings and commoners alike. It is probably not the same as Queen Nzinga (nowadays spelled Njinga) the famous queen whose name is Kimbundu, a related language. She spelled her name, usually "Ginga" to reflect the pronounciation that we nowadays write with a j.

If we had to guess, and this is not certain, we would suspect that the ancestor of this line was from Kongo's lesser nobility, captured in one of its civil wars of which there were several in the early to mid-seventeenth century and exported to Brazil (only instead of going to Portuguese America, his ship was probably hijacked by English privateers and the slaves taken to Jamestown). He was most likely a Catholic and probably a third or fourth generation Catholic, as Kongo had been a Christian country since 1491. Nobles did find themselves in America, because certain soldiers, who bore shields when fighting were regarded as noble and were paid salaries by the Kongolese treasury. There were many of them, and as they were not from the higher ranks they were probably not redeemed as much. We know that the Kongolese ambassador to Rome, redeemed some noble Kongos when he passed through Brazil in 1604, for example, but not from the lesser group (called "fidalgos" in documents in Kongo which were written in Portuguese).

If you would like more details on Kongo at that time, we can advise you more about it. Mozingo's background probably allowed him, like some of the other Jamestown slaves to get freedom fairly quickly, and hence to own land and to marry, as so many of this group did, into the English families around them.

Hope you find this interesting, and don't hesitate to write back if you have any further questions.