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DEAR BROTHER
A king welcomed strangers. Then he spent his life begging them to stop taking his people.
Sources
Afonso I (Mvemba a Nzinga) ruled Kongo from 1506 until about 1542. His letters to the kings of Portugal survive and are published in Monumenta Missionaria Africana, ed. António Brásio.
In 1526 he wrote that free people, even nobles and his own relatives, were being seized and sold to Portuguese traders. He set up a council to check every captive before shipment, and asked Portugal for priests, teachers, and wine and flour for Mass, not merchants.
King João III's reply (1529) said Kongo seemed so full of people that none appeared to have left, that taking ten thousand a year would be more praiseworthy, and that refusing Portuguese goods would weaken Afonso's power. The lines in this game paraphrase it.
In 1540 Portuguese residents tried to kill Afonso during Easter Mass. He survived.
On 29 October 1665, at Mbwila, a Portuguese-led army killed King António I and around 5,000 Kongo soldiers and nobles. Kongo fell into about fifty years of civil war, and many captured nobles were shipped to Brazil.
Between 1501 and 1866, about 12.5 million Africans were forced onto slave ships (SlaveVoyages). More came from West Central Africa, Kongo's region, than from any other.
Afonso was not blameless: Kongo held and sold war captives, and he allowed that trade to continue under his rules. The game keeps that in, because the trap only makes sense if you can feel it close.
Some names, conversations and the people at the pier are dramatised.