These 'nations', however, did not always correspond to distinct African ethnic groups or to any territorial political unit comparable to European State-nations. They were categories used by slave traders and slave owners to classify their human property, and they usually referred to the slave port or region from which Africans had been shipped to Brazil. For instance, a person enslaved in the West Central African hinterland embarked in the ports of the Angola kingdom was likely to be branded as 'Angola nation', regardless of his or her real ethnic origin. Similarly, a captive embarked on the Mina Coast, as the Portuguese called the West African littoral extending from present-day Ghana to Nigeria, was identified as pertaining to the 'Mina nation'. And yet, in early nineteenth-century Bahia, 'Mina' could also designate a more specific group, namely those embarked in the port of Aneho or Little Popo in present-day Togo. Thus, the inclusiveness and semantic domain of these categories varied through time and space, underscoring the dynamism and historically constructed nature of this system of classification.  
Another common process was for the ethnonym of a specific African group to acquire a growing comprehensiveness, to the point of including a variety of previously differentiated groups. For example, in the eighteenth century the Nagô were a small group located on the border of the ancient kingdoms of Oyo and Dahomey. In their slave raids, the Dahomeans began to call all the neighboring Yoruba-speaking people under the political influence of Oyo 'Nagô' (e.g., Sabe, Egba, Egbado, Ketu, Ijesha, Ijebu). This generic usage of the term was replicated by the Portuguese slave traders in the region, and subsequently in Brazil. In a similar period, the Gbe-speaking people under the dominion of Dahomey, located in today's Benin and Togo, began to be called Jeje in Bahia, a term of contested origins that does not correspond to any known political entity in West Africa at that time (Oliveira, 1995-96, pp. 175-93; Parés, 2013, pp. 3-7, 24-29).