Justin Croft : Rare & Fine Antiquarian Books - Specialist in antiquarian books, especially in the field of literature, history, social sciences, religion, art and architecture, science and medicine

First edition in book form, Paris issue, of this rare but influential historical novel on the life of Nzingha, the seventeenth-century queen of Angola. It is the first European novel based entirely in black Africa, as opposed to those works (notably Aphra Behn's Oroonoko of 1688) which took the uprooted African as their subject. Zingha had considerable resonance in Enlightenment France where debate over slavery, natural right and ethnography had recently been thrown open by Montesquieu, Rousseau and Voltaire. Historically, Nzingha (1581-1663) had wrestled with Portuguese colonists, showing pragmatism and cunning in negotiating the fate of her kingdom and its inhabitants (who formed the basis of the Portuguese slave trade). She is portrayed by Castilhon as both sublime and cruel. The novel appealed to the lumières, who applauded Zingha's struggle for freedom against tyranny and who read it in the context of other utopian novels, but it also later appealed to de Sade who appears to have seized on Zingha as an archetype - an omnipotent woman capable of murdering her lovers, eating her oponents and executing her errant warriors.Castilhon (b. 1720) had trained as a lawyer before participating in the foundation of the Journal encyclopédique under the patronage of Pierre Rousseau. The first version of Zingha appeared episodically in the Journal in the winter of 1768-9, before being printed at the press of the Journal at Bouillon (in present-day Belgium) in April 1769. Our copy is of the Paris issue of the same year, with cancel title page. It was reprinted with considerable modification in 1770, 1774 and 1775.