So-called 'ethnicities' attributed to Africans in the diasporas outside Africa constitute the common thread of this section. The African identity vocabulary that emerged in societies of the Atlantic, the Mediterranean, South Asia, the Middle East and China was originally constructed by slave traders from these regions. In general, when assigning an identity to African captives, these foreign traders considered a wider region, such as Abyssinia or Ethiopia, or their ports of embarkation, such as Mina (a reference to São Jorge da Mina Castle, in presentday Ghana), Macua, Moçambique and so on. Such practices generated confusion about the identity of enslaved Africans. In the Americas, this identity was also termed 'nation', nación, nação and so on. Mariza de Carvalho Soares (2002, p. 60) points out that the nations attributed to Africans by the slave traders were incorporated by enslaved groups and used to reinforce 'old ethnic borders or establish new configurations' in the Atlantic world. Soares suggests the concept of 'origin groups' (grupos de procedência) for the purposes of understanding the identity system invented by the Atlantic slave traffickers. As for the enslaved Africans, they reorganized themselves based on common ethnic attributes as an alternative, but this was not the only alternative. The contributions in this section investigate ethnogenic processes among Africans and Afrodescendants.