In Angola, Héli Chatelain (1859-1908) was the leading figure in ethnolinguistic and ethnopoetic research (although these terms were not yet used at the time), especially in the region occupied by the Ambundo people, speakers of the Kimbundu language. Chatelain was a Swiss missionary who dedicated his life to research and the teaching of languages and Christian doctrine in Angola. He was a pioneer in the publication of folk tales and linguistic studies of Kimbundu: as early as 1894 he published a Kimbundu-English bilingual edition of 50 folk tales collected and annotated during his time among the Ambundo, with a foreword and an introduction by the author (Chatelain, 1894). In this book, Folk-Tales of Angola, which became a classic, he recounts his experience of interethnic contact and presents a geopolitical, socioeconomic and ethnolinguistic description of Angola, then a Portuguese province. In the book's preface, he recounts how he learned Kimbundu during his early years there. By his third year, which he spent in Malanje, he 'had collected around three thousand words, discovering the principal rules of Kimbundu phonology, morphology, and syntax [...]' (Chatelain, 1964, pp. 63-64). In the year 1888, on his way home to his parents in Switzerland, Chatelain devoted his time to  
writing and publishing the first results of his work as a linguist and Christian missionary in Angola: a booklet, a gospel and his first grammar of Kimbundu, Kimbundu Grammar, ${ }^{1}$ written with a view to meeting the political, commercial and religious needs he identified during his first three years of work. In this grammar, Chatelain includes 'proverbs, riddles and two little folk tales', 'the earliest examples of Kimbundu folklore brought to the attention of the public' (Chatelain, 1964, p. 65, emphasis added), as he himself notes in the preface to his book Folk-Tales of Angola.