Brazil's World Cup Legacy and the Afrobeats Artists Who Sampled Samba - A Cultural Deep Dive

When the lights came up at SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles on June 12, 2026, the official anthem of the FIFA World Cup did not sound like a single country. It sounded like three of them braided together. “Goals,” the track that opened the tournament, put Thai pop star Lisa, Brazilian icon Anitta and Nigeria’s own Rema on the same record, with production handled by a team that included the Brazilian duo Tropkillaz. The song layered fast K-pop energy, Brazilian funk pulse and Afrobeats percussion into one hook, and for a few minutes the loudest sound on the planet was a conversation between Lagos, Rio and Bangkok. Released on May 21, 2026, it became the soundtrack to a tournament hosted across three nations, and for Nigerian ears one detail stood out above the rest. The rhythm underneath Anitta’s verses and the rhythm underneath Rema’s were not strangers meeting for the first time. They were relatives reuniting after a very long time apart.

That reunion is the real story here, and it stretches back centuries before any stadium existed.

A World Cup Moment That Sounded Like Home

There is a reason a Brazilian funk groove can sit so comfortably beside an Afrobeats verse without either one feeling forced. The two rhythmic worlds were never separate to begin with. “Goals” works because Tropkillaz, a Brazilian production outfit fluent in the bounce of baile funk, were building on a percussive logic that an Afrobeats producer in Lagos already understands in his bones. The downbeats land in familiar places. The syncopation breathes the same way. When Rema steps onto a Brazilian-flavoured beat, he is not crossing a border so much as walking back into a house his ancestors helped build.

Football has always been a stage for this kind of cultural mirror. Brazil and Nigeria are two of the most football-obsessed nations on earth, and both pour their identity into the game and into the music that surrounds it. The 2026 anthem simply made the musical kinship audible to a mass audience. But the kinship itself was forged long before broadcasting existed, in the holds of slave ships and on the plantations of Bahia, where West African rhythm refused to die and instead became something new.

The Trans-Atlantic Roots: How Africa Shaped Samba

To understand why samba feels familiar to a Yoruba listener, you have to follow the people. Between the 1530s and the abolition of the trade in the nineteenth century, roughly four million enslaved Africans were transported to Brazil, more than to any other destination in the Americas. The earliest arrivals came largely from the Guinea coast. By the seventeenth century, populations from Angola and Congo had become dominant. Then, between roughly 1775 and 1850, a wave of Yoruba and Dahomean people arrived from the Gulf of Benin, from territories that are now Nigeria and Benin.

These people carried no possessions, but they carried rhythm, language and belief, and those proved impossible to confiscate. In the northeastern state of Bahia, where the largest share of enslaved Africans first disembarked, their drumming traditions, call-and-response singing and ceremonial dance survived and adapted. Out of that survival came Samba de Roda, the circle dance of Bahia widely recognised as the first form of samba. When Bahians later migrated south to Rio de Janeiro, they carried Samba de Roda with them, and it became the seed from which the carnival samba of Rio eventually grew.

The thread is unbroken. The samba that the world associates with Brazilian carnival did not appear from nowhere. It is a direct descendant of West and Central African musical practice, reshaped by the brutal conditions of slavery and the new world the enslaved were forced to inhabit. Strip samba down to its skeleton, the layered hand drums, the interlocking patterns, the bell that keeps time, and the African architecture is plain to see.

The Living Religion Inside the Rhythm

The clearest proof of this lineage is not in the dance halls but in the temples. Candomblé, the Afro-Brazilian religion that took root in Bahia, arose from the faiths brought by enslaved West and Central Africans, the majority of them Yoruba, Fon and Bantu. At its centre sits the worship of the orixás, the same divinities the Yoruba call orisha, honoured in Brazil under Yoruba names and in Yoruba language. Shango, Yemoja, Oshun and Ogun crossed the Atlantic in the memory of the enslaved and found a second home in Salvador.

That worship is built on drums. The core Candomblé ensemble uses three hand-played atabaque drums, the tall low-pitched rum, the mid-range rumpi and the small high-pitched lê, guided by a lead drummer who cues every change in energy. Alongside them rings the agogô, a metal bell whose very name is Yoruba, the same word and the same instrument family used in Yoruba ceremonial music in Nigeria. The polyrhythmic drumming, the call-and-response chants sung to the orixás, the way the rhythm builds toward an ecstatic peak, all of it is recognisably West African religious practice preserved across an ocean.

This matters for the music argument because secular Brazilian rhythm did not develop in a vacuum next to the sacred. The two fed each other. The percussive vocabulary that powers carnival, that powers afoxé processions, that eventually informs Brazilian popular music, was schooled in the same drum traditions that survived inside Candomblé. The bell pattern of the agogô and the conversation between high and low drums are the genetic material that connects a Bahian terreiro to a Lagos compound.

The Rhythmic Family Tree: Samba, Afrobeat and Amapiano

Place the genres side by side and the family resemblance sharpens. Afrobeat, the genre Fela Kuti pioneered in Nigeria in the 1960s, fused American funk and jazz with highlife and traditional Yoruba rhythm. Fela’s longtime drummer Tony Allen built grooves that gave funk its structure and jazz its freedom while the Yoruba foundation supplied call-and-response, melodic shape and communal drive. That same Yoruba rhythmic DNA, the layered percussion and the bell-anchored timekeeping, is the very thing that travelled to Bahia generations earlier and helped shape samba.

Modern Afrobeats, the streaming-era pop sound of Wizkid, Davido, Burna Boy, Rema and Ayra Starr, inherits that percussive sensibility and pairs it with sleek production. Amapiano, the South African genre born in Johannesburg townships, adds its hypnotic log-drum bass and shuffling hi-hats, and the hybrid form sometimes called Afropiano has become one of the most popular flavours of the African pop wave. What samba, Afrobeat, amapiano and Brazilian funk all share is a way of building music from interlocking rhythm rather than from chord changes alone, of letting percussion carry the melody and the message at once. They are different branches, but the root system is common ground.

This is why a producer like Tropkillaz can hand a Brazilian funk pattern to Rema and have it land as natural. The grammar is shared. The accent differs, the vocabulary differs, but the underlying language was learned from the same teachers.

Verified Threads of Exchange in Modern Music

Honesty matters here, because it would be easy to overstate. There is no famous Afrobeats record built on a literal sampled chunk of vintage samba that can be cleanly pointed to as the smoking gun. The deeper connection is rhythmic and ancestral rather than a single lifted loop. But the documented modern exchange between African pop and the wider Black Atlantic is real and verifiable, and it is accelerating.

The clearest example is the very anthem that opened this World Cup. “Goals” is a confirmed collaboration in which Rema’s Afrobeats sits inside production shaped by Brazilian funk, courtesy of Tropkillaz, alongside Bava, Cirkut and PinkSlip. Anitta, the song’s Brazilian voice, has spent the past few years pushing baile funk onto the global stage, and her presence on a track with a Nigerian star is exactly the kind of bridge that did not exist a decade ago.

The broader crossover record is well documented. Wizkid’s “Essence,” featuring Tems, became the first Nigerian song to reach the top ten of the Billboard Hot 100, peaking at number ten and climbing to number two on the Billboard Global 200 after a remix with Justin Bieber. Critics openly compared its breakthrough to the Latin pop explosion that “Despacito” announced, framing Afrobeats and reggaeton as parallel movements rising from the same global appetite. Rema’s “Calm Down,” the duet with Selena Gomez, went further still, peaking at number three on the Hot 100, the highest position ever reached by an Afrobeats lead artist, and spending a record 57 weeks on that chart. Tyla, carrying the amapiano flag from South Africa, took her single “Water” to number seven on the Hot 100 and won the first ever Grammy for Best African Music Performance at the 2024 ceremony.

None of these are samba samples, and it would be dishonest to dress them up as such. What they prove is something more interesting. African pop and Latin music are converging in real time, drawn together by audiences who hear the kinship even when they cannot name it. Music journalists have tracked reggaeton artists looking south toward baile funk while Afrobeats edges closer to dancehall and reggaeton, all of them circling rhythms that trace back to African drum traditions carried across the Atlantic. The streaming playlists that pair Afrobeats with baile funk and amapiano are not random. They are listeners rediscovering a family tree.

The Bahia-Yoruba Cultural Bridge

The most striking proof that this connection runs both ways sits in Lagos itself. Beginning in the 1830s, and intensifying after the 1835 Malê uprising in Bahia, thousands of freed and freeborn Afro-Brazilians sailed back across the Atlantic and resettled in West Africa, many of them landing in Lagos. The Oba granted them land, and the district they built became known as Popo Aguda, the Brazilian Quarter, on Lagos Island. By the 1880s these returnees, the Agudás, made up close to a tenth of the city’s population.

They returned changed. Many had lived as Yoruba, been enslaved in Brazil, absorbed Brazilian and Catholic culture, then come home as something hybrid. They brought Brazilian building techniques that still mark Lagos architecture in stucco façades, arched windows, verandas and ornamental ironwork. Some carried Catholicism, some Islam, and some still honoured the orishas they had worshipped under different names in Bahia. They were, in the truest sense, cultural translators, fluent in both shores. Lagos even sustained a Fanti Carnival, a celebration of Afro-Brazilian heritage that carries the memory of that return migration into the present.

So the bridge is not a metaphor. Real people sailed it in both directions. The Yoruba who were taken to Bahia kept their gods and their drums alive there. Their descendants who returned to Lagos brought Brazilian flavour home with them. The cultural traffic between Salvador and Lagos has been continuous for nearly two centuries, and the music made on both ends of that route grew from the same source while constantly nourishing the other.

What the Connection Means Today

For a Nigerian listener watching Anitta and Rema share a World Cup stage, the meaning is layered. It is not simply that African music has finally been invited to the global party. It is that the party itself was always partly African. Samba, the sound the world treats as the essence of Brazil, is a West African inheritance that survived the worst chapter of human history and flowered into something glorious. When that sound now meets Afrobeats on a hit record, the encounter is a homecoming dressed as a collaboration.

This reframes how the current African pop wave should be understood. Afrobeats and amapiano are not borrowing prestige from the West by appearing on Billboard charts and World Cup anthems. They are reclaiming a place in a conversation their ancestors started. The rhythmic logic that Tony Allen sharpened in Fela’s band, the bell patterns that ring through Candomblé, the bounce that Tropkillaz program into a baile funk beat, these are dialects of one rhythmic mother tongue. The charts are catching up to a relationship that the drums have known all along.

It also explains why these collaborations feel effortless rather than gimmicky. When industries try to manufacture a crossover between genres with nothing in common, listeners can hear the seams. The Afrobeats and Brazilian fusion works because there are no real seams to hide. The two traditions are made of compatible material because, at the deepest level, they are made of the same material.

Why the samba and Afrobeats thread holds

Walk through the Brazilian Quarter in Lagos today and the stucco façades are still there, weathered but standing, raised by hands that learned their craft in Bahia. Sit in a Candomblé terreiro in Salvador and the atabaque drums still speak Yoruba to the orixás, the agogô bell still ringing the same word it rings in a Lagos compound. Cue up “Goals” one more time and the same lineage hums under Anitta’s funk and Rema’s flow, two voices from opposite shores of one ocean, finishing a sentence their great-great-grandparents began. The World Cup will name its champion and the tournament will end, but the rhythm that carried its anthem was never going to leave with the trophy. It has been crossing the Atlantic for four hundred years, and on a stage in Los Angeles in June 2026, it simply did it again in front of the whole watching world.