Welcome back to Gold Weights and Griots, I am Kofi Mensah-Darko. Today's episode is built around a stack of letters. Between 1506 and 1543, Afonso the First, king of Kongo, wrote dozens of them to the kings of Portugal. He wrote in Portuguese, which he had learned, and he wrote as one monarch to another. He asked for priests and teachers and carpenters. Then, by 1526, he was writing to say that Portuguese traders were kidnapping his own people, including nobles and his own relatives, and shipping them away, and he asked the king of Portugal to stop it. We read those letters in order, we look at what Lisbon actually replied, and we ask what it means that one of the clearest African voices of the sixteenth century was heard and then ignored. You are listening on Witspeak Podcasts.