Arguments about women's power in Africa often turn on how much of a senior woman's authority was symbolic and how much was real. Thornton takes the Kingdom of Kongo as his test case.

Through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, elite Kongo women exercised power at one remove, working through the male relatives they could influence. That shifted once civil war broke out after 1665: women began to hold power overtly, running sections of the country with less reliance on male intermediaries.

The limit held at the top. Unlike their counterparts in Ndongo and Matamba, Kongo women never took control of the state itself.