Inasmuch as these external categories served the slavers to help administer and control their human merchandise, Gerhard Kubik (1979, p. 10) has called them 'trade marks'. Also, because they often encompassed individuals from various ethnic groups, they can be conceived as meta-ethnic labels (Parés, 2013, pp. 3-4). And yet, members of the same 'nation', favoured by their relative linguistic intelligibility, soon recognized shared cultural affinities and commonalities. Hence 'trade marks' were progressively appropriated by enslaved and freed Africans in colonial Brazil and used to forge new diasporic forms of belonging and collective identity, as suggested by the dances of Santo Amaro. So, one could say that most African nations in Brazil were the result of an Atlantic genesis.  
By the mid-nineteenth century, at the dawn of the Brazilian Empire and at the end of the Atlantic slave trade, the identification of Africans by nation  
slowly faded away from the official documents (e.g., wills and post-mortem inventories), and wider racially-coded categories such as 'African' or 'Black' (preto) became more common, contributing to the formation of a broad ethnoracial black identity. Nonetheless, the identification of Africans in terms of the 'nation' repertoire inherited from the Atlantic slave trade seems to have prevailed in the informal and less visible dynamic of black sociability, particularly within the Afro-Brazilian religious community. It is worth noting that it was at this time that Afro-Brazilian religions became progressively institutionalized.