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traditional triangular pattern, and where racial relations also took particular contours.8 Thus, studying the South Atlantic implies not only comparing but also analyzing the exchanges on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, where Africa plays an important role; this is because African identities are also reconstructed in the present through the dialogue with the diaspora.9
Pierre Verger (1902–1996) divided the slave trade between Africa and the Brazilian slave ports into various cycles related to various African coastal regions and groups of people. The West African coast was usually designated as “Mina Coast,” while the Central-Oriental coast was usually referred to as “Angola”; however, these names varied over time. Within the Atlantic slave market, enslaved Africans received various denominations, such as “Mina,” “Angola,” “Congo,” and “Nagô,” but most of the time these classifications did not correspond to their actual region and group of origin. In West Africa, the name “Mina,” which means “mine,” was associated with the Gold Coast, the region comprising present-day Ghana that held important deposits of gold. In 1471 the Portuguese reached the Guinea coast. Between the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries, the name Guinea was used to designate various portions of the West African coastal region: the region from the present-day Senegal to the Western Central coast or even to the whole western coast.10
In 1481 Portuguese settlers started building the castle São Jorge da Mina (Elmina) on the coast. The castle became the first European trading post in the Gulf of Guinea. Although in the Americas, both Gbe-speaking and Akan-speaking slaves were called “Mina,” it was only after 1637, when the Portuguese lost the São Jorge de Mina castle to the Dutch, that the name “Mina Coast” began to be used to designate the eastern region of the Gold Coast.11
Verger designated the first cycle of the Atlantic slave trade to Brazil, which took place during the second half of the sixteenth century, as the “cycle of Guinea.” During this cycle, enslaved Africans exported to Brazil belonged to pan-ethnic groups identified as “Wolof,” “Mandingo,” “Songhai,” “Mossi,” “Hausa,” “Fulani,” and “Kamite.”12 During the “cycle of Angola and Congo” in the seventeenth century, Brazil imported Africans from Western Central Africa (Angola-Congo) belonging to