Zumbi

Zumbi dos Palmares led the Quilombo dos Palmares, the largest community of escaped slaves in colonial Brazil, until his death in 1695; the day he died, 20 November, is now Black Awareness Day. Ben's song begins at a slave market, naming the African regions the captives were taken from, Angola, Congo and Benguela, and turns on its refrain: I want to see what happens when Zumbi arrives. Musically it is built on voice and percussion, with a short rising guitar figure that announces the climax and brings the band crashing back.

He first performed it at Phono 73 in São Paulo in May 1973, a nearly seven-minute version released decades later, and recorded it for A Tábua de Esmeralda in 1974. Two years later he remade it as África Brasil (Zumbi), the closing track of África Brasil. That vocal is the angriest he ever recorded, and he said the anger was real: Philips had just removed his producer from the sessions. Caetano Veloso covered it on Noites do Norte in 2000, and the historian Alexandre Reis took its refrain as the title of a dissertation on race in Ben's work.