Jamaica’s enslaved Africans came from shifting West African source regions over time

Evidence

In almost equal parts, the origins of these Africans had been along the routes that fed into the slave ports at the Bight of Biafra, the Gold Coast, Central Africa, the Bight of Benin, and Sierra Leone. This ethnic distribution, however, was not the result of consistent or regular patterns of recruitment. Initially, Orlando Patterson concludes, the predominant groups were the “Coromantees” (Kormantin was a port about 70 miles west of Accra), the Akan, and Ga-Andangme peoples. After 1675, and for the rest of the century, the British trade for Jamaica shifted to Angola and the Ewespeaking peoples of Dahomey. Between 1700 and 1730, the Slave Coast and Ghana became the favorite sources only to be succeeded themselves in the years between 1730 and 1760 by the Niger and Cross deltas. At the end of the eighteenth century, the Congo once again became the dominant region, followed successively by the Niger and Cross deltas, the Gold Coast and (by a much smaller order) the Windward Coast. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 594