Nearly everything detailed known about Njinga comes from Italian Capuchins, above all Giovanni Antonio Cavazzi, who lived at her court in her last years, and Antonio da Gaeta, who received her back into the church. Both wrote at length, both drew, and Cavazzi's illustrated manuscript is one of the richest visual sources on seventeenth century Angola. Both were also missionaries reporting to an order and to Rome, writing a narrative whose proper shape was the reclamation of a soul, and the more lurid material about her Imbangala years sits exactly where that narrative needs it.
Portuguese military and administrative records supply a second, differently interested account, of an enemy commander. Nothing survives from her own side in her own words. The consequence is that a woman who ruled for four decades reaches modern readers as a set of scenes chosen by her adversaries and her confessors, and that the most repeated stories about her, including the well known one about the chair at Luanda, come from that material and cannot be checked. Recent scholarship has worked to read the Capuchin sources against their own purposes rather than either accepting or discarding them, which is the only method available.