He was also the last of the kings of the Quilombo dos Palmares, a settlement of Afro-Brazilian people who liberated themselves from enslavement in the present-day state of Alagoas, Brazil.

[3] Palmares was established around 1605 by 40 enslaved central Africans who fled to the heavily forested hills that parallel the northern coast of Brazil.

[4] Quilombo dos Palmares was a self-sustaining kingdom of Maroons escaped from the Portuguese settlements in Brazil, "a region perhaps the size of Portugal in the hinterland of Pernambuco".

Palmares developed into a confederation of 11 towns, spanning rugged mountainous terrain in frontier zones across the present day states of Alagoas and Pernambuco.

[3] Palmares was an autonomous state based on African political and religious customs that supported itself though means of agriculture, fishing, hunting, gathering, trading, and raiding nearby Brazilian plantations and settlements.

The Portuguese won the battle eventually, killing 5,000 men, and captured the king, his two sons, his two nephews, four governors, various court officials, 95 title holders and 400 other nobles who were put on ships and sold as slaves in the Americas.

Some are believed to have been sent to Spanish America, but Ganga Zumba, his brother Zona and Sabina were made slaves at the plantation of Santa Rita in the Captaincy of Pernambuco in what is now northeast Brazil.

By 1678, the governor of the captaincy of Pernambuco, Pedro Almeida, weary of the longstanding conflict with Palmares, approached its king Ganga Zumba with an olive branch.

[4] On February 6, 1694, after 67 years of conflict with the cafuzos, or Maroons, of Palmares, the Portuguese succeeded in destroying Cerca do Macaco, the kingdom's central settlement.

[8] Although it was eventually crushed, the success of Palmares through most of the 17th century greatly challenged colonial authority and would stand as a beacon of slave resistance in the times to come.

Today, Zumbi is considered a hero of great magnitude amongst Afro-Brazilians who celebrate his courage, leadership qualities, and heroic resistance to Portuguese colonial rule.