 In 1525, the Kongolese king Afonso I seized a French vessel and its crew for illegally trading on his coast.Historians have widely debated the nature of the relationship between these African kingdoms and the European traders.The Guyanese historian Walter Rodney (1972) has argued that it was an unequal relationship, with Africans being forced into a "colonial" trade with the more economically developed Europeans, exchanging raw materials and human resources (i.e.